Louise Glck, poet laureate from 2003-2004, served as a perfect foil to the previous poet laureate, Billy Collins.

Her poems, darkly Lyrical, focusing on failed relationships, despair, and regret, tour the most intimate human feelings, her most prominent subject being the agony of the self. Instead of using overly complex language, Gluck's technical mastery of terse, stripped-down verse, in poems such as A Fable, leave an ambiguity that forces the reader to develop their own context, while poems such as Mock Orange contain startling shifts that cause readers to examine their own lives in the text. Other poems of hers take after A Fantasy, in which Gluck elevates a hackneyed topic such as death with a poignant concrete scene. Gluck is not only a poet who dabbles in solely human abstractions, as many of her best works tie nature to the human experience, such as All Hallows. Gluck's poetry has a tendency to draw on commonly known myths, parables, and stories from religious cannon for much of her poetry, and uses it as a metaphor for situations that, while first seeming to be in contention with the past, contain many parallels, which she exposes and exploits. This is extremely evident in her poem A Fable. The opening lines set the magnitude of the poem; Two with the same claim to the feet of the wise king are lines straight out of the biblical account of a trial Solomon dealt with in the bible. The story is played straight: the two women claim that the one child is each theirs, and the king commands that the child be cut in half so that no one will go home empty handed. As he went to cut the child in half, the true mother of the child renounced her share and this was, in Gluck's words, the lesson to take from the story. Her short, choppy lines, and matter of fact language coupled with terse description give way to an abrupt shift from the ancient past to the life of the poet. Instead of abstractly deconstructing the implications of this fable, Gluck instead directly applies the lesson to her own life, but the message is twisted; she's in the same situation as the mother, but instead of trying to win her daughter in the eyes of a king, she's trying to prove to herself that she is the truer daughter of her mother by ceasing to divide her mother's love. When she implores the reader to suppose you saw your mother torn between two daughters she is meditating on situations that have

arisen in her own life. The mother has become the biblical baby; not threatened to be destroyed by a king but by herself, in her trying to divide her time between her two daughters. The titular fable from the beginning of the poem almost serves as a reassurance to the author that she is taking the right course of action, that by being willing to destroy yourself her mother will know who is the rightful child, and by refusing to divide the mother, she will win her affection. A Fable while an introspective poem, still does much to keep the reader invested and drawn into the progress of the poem, by first using a reference that the majority of readers will be familiar with, followed by her use of you. Rather than making the poem entirely self-centric, the poet works to convey the feelings she is grappling with, while still using sparing discourse and as few words as possible to exhibit her ideas. While A Fable tries to do this, the opposite can be seen in an earlier work of Gluck's, titled Mock Orange. Here is not a poem relating antiquity to modern day angst, but a discourse on marriage and the failures the poem's persona feels arrive from the false unions marriage creates. Gluck opens the poem by getting the reader in the mindset of the speaker, saying that It's not the moon , but these flowers/ lighting the yard that (can be inferred) are keeping her awake. It is, rather startlingly so, that she hates them (the flowers). [She] hates them as much as [she] hates sex. Readers are not left in the dark as to why for long, as in the next lines she elucidates us as to why. The poet lets us know that it is not the act that she hates, but the low, humiliating premise of union. That union, or lack of it in its truest sense, is what the poet hates. She hates the man's mouth, sealing [her] mouth and the man's paralyzing body not due to a fear of intimacy, but of a hatred for the false oneness the let her know is about to happen. In my mind tonight I hear the question and pursuing answer fused in one sound gives the impression that the speaker has just finished the act of sex, and these ruminations arise directly from the position she was in moments ago. The post-coital tristesse, or sadness that occurs after sexual intercourse in some individuals, has definitely effected the speaker of this poem. The one sound that mounts and mounts and then is split

into the old selves is a metonymy, using the voices as representation of the married couple's sexual interactions. The split in to old selves, the tired antagonisms are seen by the speaker as cheapening the union sex is supposed to embody. When she states that We were made fools of she is referring to how herself and her husband thought they would become so close through marriage, and yet have not. She then hearkens back to the opening of the poem, returning to the flowers she so despises, as the scent of mock orange drifts through the window. Orange blossoms are a wedding flowers, and the faux oranges are yet another symbol of the facade of their union in sex. The questions she raises at the end of the poem holds a new legitimacy after more careful inspection of the text; How can I rest? How can I be content when there is still this odor in the world? relays that the sickeningly sweet smell of the blossoms is not the real offender this night, but herself, and the man she married. Persona poems make up a good portion of Gluck's poems, but often she uses scenes from life to highlight her ideas. A Fantasy is one such poem. Opening with an admittedly sad set of lines, Every day people are dying. And that's just the beginning. She chooses extremely loaded words, such as widows, funeral homes and Orphans to establish a connection with the reader early. Her opening is slightly abstract, but quickly moves to real life. The reader sees their hands folded, trying to decide about this new life without their dead relative, before hurriedly moving to the family's graveside service. The poet delves straight into the emotions of the family; any person who has had a family member die knows what Gluck is saying when she writes that they're frightened of crying, sometimes of not crying, and elegantly lays out the feeling of a shell-shocked family at a burial service when mentions that someone leans over and tells them what to do next and that it might mean saying a few words, sometimes throwing dirt on an open grave. A more narrative poem than the previously mentioned works, Gluck next moves to from the grave back to the home of the widow and her children, for the visitation of the family after the funeral, again with great celerity. Back to the house, which is suddenly full of visitors is where we see the facade of strength the mother has put up around the guests. The widow sits very stately hiding her pain from those around

her, as people line up to approach her in the obligatory conversation with the family that all those who came to the funeral must take part in. They go through the motions of truly caring, they sometimes take her hand and sometimes embrace her. The whole interchange appears extremely false; she's able to find something to say to everyone and thanks them, thanks them for coming but as can be seen in the next line, she feels no joy in these sentiments and condolences, no happiness on her couch, very stately. The first statement of the next stanza is a fitting In her heart, she wants them to go away. We see her pain in this stanza, more readily than any other; here we see how she wants to be back in the cemetery, back in the sickroom, the hospital. Her despair is evident in these lines, and it is made even more sad with the line she knows it isn't possible. But it is her only hope. The wish to move backward is a feeling all those who have lost understand, the wish to return to a time when those you loved were alive, to be back with the one she loved. She wants to go not so far as the marriage, the first kiss; the widow wants to go back, even if it is just for a second, to the time when she and her husband were newly in love, to a time so fleeting, yet poignant. Gluck's style of sparse words giving rise to massive complexity that must be filled in by the reader is most evident here; without the knowledge of one who has died, understanding of this poem, while not impossible, is made exceedingly difficult. In All Hallows, we see Gluck's take on pastoral poetry, infusing each stanza with her own style and unique look upon what would otherwise have been a very typical, bland scene. Painting with a small brush, this three stanza poem (in which one stanza is a single line) has as much technical mastery as any long-winded soliloquy on nature, and in may ways is much more poignant. Darkness, as with much of Glucks poetry, is one of the dominant motif's of the lines present in this pastoral; The hills darken in the second line of the poem, setting the mood by quickly adding the heaviness that radiates from this poem. The fields have been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside gives

the feeling of desolation, of an emptiness that comes at the end of harvest, and evokes that feeling that comes when one looks at an empty farm at the end of fall, right after everything has been taken to market but the snow has not fallen yet. The darkness, coupled with the desolate imagery of the land, work to create a menacing air in the poem, a tone of foreboding. In the following line, we hear of the toothed moon rising among the cinquefoil, a fitting combination; these flowers, often called barren strawberries, blend well with the land the inhabit in this poem. This cohesion runs throughout the poem; whereas a lot of Gluck's poetry, at first, seems to contain many abrupt, even strange, shifts in topics, All Hallows has a singularity of theme that contrasts with a lot of Gluck's work. The ever-present theme of ruin is not the only thing present in this poem. While retaining the barrenness of harvest or pestilence Gluck adds ambiguity by way of the woman leaning out of her window. The poem lets the reader know she is married, but readers here nothing about any other members of her family; the focus is not on her, but what she adds to the landscape; the world painted here is less American Gothic and more Pastoral Landscape; she is but a small part in an amalgamation of small parts that add to the whole scene. Her hands are extended, as in payment, but from this the poem leaves the woman, and focuses on the seeds, a distinct gold which connotate new life in the barren wasteland of the harvested farm the poem meditates on. The seeds, seemingly to the woman are calling Come here Come here, little one beckoning her who would appear to be receptive to their message, if her hands reaching towards them are any indication. The stanza's ending leads one to believe this poem's overall theme was regrowth, new life, or a longing for the transformative power of the future, but as is characteristic of much of Gluck's work, it ends with a peculiar, abrupt and jarring note; and the soul creeps out of the tree. Nowhere before this point has any mention of anything explicitly spiritual been made; these