click to enlarge - Courtesy of Katherine Wolkoff/Steven Barclay Agency
- Louise Glück
Former Vermont poet laureate Louise Glück, whose gift for suffusing the mundane with the sublime won her virtually every honor available to a writer in America, including the National Book Award for Poetry, the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at 80. Her publisher, Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, confirmed her death to the Associated Press on Friday afternoon. No additional details were provided.
Glück — pronounced “Glick” — wrote more than a dozen books of poetry, prose and essays over the course of her life, including
The Triumph of Achilles, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, and
The Wild Iris, for which she won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She was born in New York City in 1943 to eastern European Jewish parents. Precision may have been in her blood; her father, a Hungarian immigrant, coinvented the X-Acto knife.
She published her first volume of poetry,
Firstborn, in 1968, then suffered a long bout of writer’s block that finally ended when she moved to Plainfield for a teaching job at Goddard College in the early ’70s. Glück, who later taught at Yale and Stanford universities,
told the Nation in 2022 that coming to Vermont revitalized her: “The place was always a solace, no matter how difficult my life was at a particular period, or how flourishing. I felt that it took care of me in some way, was seeing to me.”
Glück’s subject matter was the vastness of human experience — birth, death, sex, aging, grief — filtered through the lens of nature and classical mythology. She wrote about pain with devastating clarity. In the title poem of
The Wild Iris, she imagined a bulb deep underground, a flicker of life awaiting its moment:
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.