Word: glucks
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...course, this is a single poem, and Gluck has always been a complex poet. Yet her new book of poems, Vita Nova, presents a self-revision which suggests Gluck believes she has grown out of something. Vita Nova depicts reconciliation with personality sins: fear, dream, lying, fragmentation and women who do not regret their sexual falls but instead say to their lover, "Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;/you had only to look...
...Gluck, then, does not scorn her old idealism; she simply recognizes it as a self-fulfilling dream, embracing it as part of her identity and her human need for happiness. She is not embarrassed if in the past she was foolish or hypocritical: in "Earthly Love" Gluck admits that she once avoided clear self-perception and claims, "And yet, within this deception,/true happiness occurred." In "Descent to the valley," she describes her old vision of life as an upward climb into light followed by a descent into uncertainty, and then states, "I have found it otherwise...
Oddly enough, Gluck maintains a cool, stony voice throughout--despite her pluralistic embraces. She recalls antiquity, speaking through Aeneas, Eurydice and Orpheus in various poems, yet her usage encloses the most tragic scenes in a modern living room. She retells: "In the end, Dido/summoned her ladies in waiting/that they might see/the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the fates." The phrase "In the end" dooms the stanza to almost blase speech, which is almost bucked by the phrase "that they might," until the stanza ends with the prepositional pile-up "inscribed for her by the fates." Flat language and idioms...
...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...