‘At the end of my suffering / there was a door’ … Louise Glück. Photograph: Susan Walsh

Louise Glück: a poet who never shied away from silence, pain or fear

Her work included long periods in which she wrote nothing – and when she did write, she had little sense that it was hers

 Louise Glück, Nobel prize-winning poet, dies at 80

Colm Tóibín

Tuesday 17 October 2023

 

L

ouise Glück was reticent, careful about what she said. She could be distant. There was always a sense that her real life was lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her time alone. With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.

Louise Glück / Colm Tóibín on a brave and truthful Nobel winner

Louise Glück

Louise Glück: Colm Tóibín on a brave and truthful Nobel winner

Her brilliantly controlled poems offer a picture of the world as a struggle between ordeal and wonder

Colm Tóibín
Fri 9 Oct 2020 06.00 BST

I

n Stanford in 2008, the Irish poet Eavan Boland told me how much she admired the work of Louise Glück. She took down some volumes of her poetry from the shelf in her office and gave them to me.

That night I read the opening lines of a poem:

I sleep so you will be alive,

it is that simple.

The dreams themselves are nothing.

They are the sickness you control,

nothing more.

It was called A Dream of Mourning. I was amazed by its chiselled, hurt tone, the mixture of what was deeply private and oddly heightened and mythical.

In an essay about Emily Dickinson, Glück wrote: “It is hard to think of a body of work that so manages, without renouncing personal authority, to so invest in the single reader.” Of TS Eliot’s poetry, Glück has observed: “And I suppose that, among sensitive readers, there must be many who do not share my taste for outcry.” And writing about the poet George Oppen, Glück called him “a master of white space; of restraint, juxtaposition, nuance”.

All of which could be said about her own work. Her poems are controlled and highly charged, restrained but also exposed, unafraid of and perhaps also terrified by outcry. Glück has described “harnessing the power of the unfinished”, to create a whole that does not lose the dynamic presence of what remains incomplete: “I dislike poems that feel too complete, the seal too tight; I dislike being herded into certainty.”

They open up a stark space. The sounds in her poems emerge tentatively and then bravely, and sometimes fiercely, from within their rhythms. Glück knows what a tone needs when it seeks to be truthful. She has a knowledge, both baleful and enabling, of how little can be said that is true, and how much dark energy that is then released in the effort to speak. In her poems, tone itself is both held in and released. Her work is filled with voice, often hushed and whispering, as though she is exploring a difficult aftermath or the shape of the soul.

If there is one poem by her that gives us a sense of her great talent and the bravery of her voice, it is the opening poem in her collection The Wild Iris, which begins:

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

I have heard her say that this image was with her for years before she found a place for it. In the sequence of poems in the book, Glück follows nature with a distilled diction, the tone filled with pity and wonder, but also a sense of effort and striving. In all her poetry, we get a picture of the world as a struggle between ordeal and wonder. There is always a sense that the poems themselves are the result, too, of a struggle within Glück’s own imagination for words that are precise but also suggestive, for phrases that are sonorous but hard-edged, too.

It is difficult to think of another living poet whose voice contains so much electrifying undercurrent, whose rhythms are under such control, but whose work is also so exposed and urgent.

THE GUARDIAN

Borges / A life by Edwin Williamson / Review by Colm Tóibín

Don’t abandon me

By Colm Tóibín

• Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson
  Penguin, 416 pp, £9.99, August 2005, ISBN 0 14 024657 6

On 9 March 1951, Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later, Vidia, in a letter to the entire family, wrote: ‘I hope Pa does write, even five hundred words a day. He should begin a novel. He should realise that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one – one of phoney sophistication.’ Soon, his father wrote again to say that he had in fact started to write five hundred words a day. ‘Let me see how well the resolve works out,’ he wrote. ‘Even now I have not settled the question whether I should work on an autobiographical novel or whether I should exhume Gurudeva.’ Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales had been privately published in Port of Spain in 1943. It would be Seepersad Naipaul’s only book. He died in 1953 at the age of 47.

For writers and artists whose fathers dabbled in art and failed there seems always to be a peculiar intensity in their levels of ambition and determination. It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household.

Jorge Luis Borges was in Majorca in 1919, writing his first poems as his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was working on his only novel, which, like Seepersad Naipaul’s book, was printed privately. (Borges’s mother later told Bioy Casares that she had spent her life with ‘dos locos’, two madmen – her husband and her son.) The novel, called El Caudillo, published in 1921 when the author was 47 and his son 22, was not a success. Seventeen years later, as his health was failing, Borges Senior suggested that his son rewrite the book, making clear that Jorge Luis, or Georgie as he was known in his family, had been consulted during its composition. ‘I put many metaphors in to please you,’ he told his son, asking him to ‘rewrite the novel in a straightforward way, with all the fine writing and purple patches left out’.