Word: gluck
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Though Daniels' vibrant voice has made him the first contemporary countertenor with the potential to become an international operatic superstar, many others have had major careers. In the 18th century, falsettists regularly alternated with castrati on the operatic stage, singing the virtuoso coloratura roles of Handel and Gluck. But once the castration of boys was banned, and unaltered male singers started belting out high notes in the manner of the modern tenor, the demand for countertenors began to decline. By the end of the 19th century the voice type had all but vanished; on the rare occasions when baroque operas...
...Gluck speaks to the Greeks without adopting their speech, she also eschews personal contract with her readers. Making copious use of the first person pronoun, Gluck nonetheless maintains distance. Although a good deal of Vita Nova is devoted to the regenerating power of memory, the memories recounted are usually slight images of rooms and smells. Gluck reveals herself largely through allegory and the retelling of myth, so that the presence of "I" throughout her book creates an atmosphere of polite poetics that never takes readers into themselves...
Furthermore, Gluck is quick to switch narratorial perspectives, writing call and answer poems in which she is only sometimes the subject. Her opening poem, "Vita Nova," begins, "You saved me, you should remember me." A plot and an addressee are suddenly implied and then dropped, and the poems that follow are similarly oblique...
...beginning and ending poems of Vita Nova are themselves titled "Vita Nova," bookending a sequence of 32 inter-locking poems. It is a deeply reinforced whole--one of the last poems likens grief to the dark wood of a lute, referencing and earlier poem, "Lute Song," in which Gluck discusses the construction of the "overwhelmingly beautiful" out of "terror or pain." All of the poems address the problem of a new life, and the more obscure ones benefit from their embedment in the Vita Nova sequence...
...Gluck lavishes layer after layer upon her theme, but the poems themselves are hard to grasp. Usually jumping straight to the big abstract idea, as in "I am weary of the world's gifts, the world's/ stipulated limits," she fails to illustrate adequately her points or make the reader feel them. Poor in images, her unsentimental poems are easily forgotten. Her form, occasionally (seemingly arbitrarily) rhyming, of dull everyday speech does little to enhance her words. Although she completely penetrates and bursts the peephole perspective of sexual resentment and idealistic angst, her from seems to lag behind...