"The Wild Iris"
|
By Elizabeth Kelly
Contributing Writer
(April 7, 2015) "Faithful and Virtuous Night" by Louise Glück is a stunning compilation of poetry and stream-of-consciousness storytelling full of shadowy, enchanted truths. Winner of the 2014 National Book Award, Glück’s poems are in many ways a collection of farewells to love, loss, and the past. She tells the story of a painful childhood describing how youth readily confines one’s thoughts, however prolific or painful they may be, to the unexpressed mind. Glück is not always the narrator of her own work but the pain and realism in her words strike a personal chord. Her words are simply stirring:
I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings.
Author of a number of poetry books and essay collections, Glück was named the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003-2004 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her work, "The Wild Iris." She has garnered numerous accolades throughout her career and is considered one of the world’s foremost contemporary poets. Her work is intensely tangible and vivid, employing multiple senses to reveal the worlds she creates.
"The Pedestrians" by Rachel Zucker is a dual tome of third-person prose called “fables” and first-person poetry contained to a section aptly titled “the pedestrians.” Zucker’s work is rooted in her metropolitan family life discussing marriage, children, travel, and the everyday. Each piece is an outward expression of an inward struggle. Zucker contemplates, “It was hard to say goodbye to the ocean. […] But to whom? To which part? The part of the ocean that was trying to push her away or the part that wanted to swallow her?”
The narrator, presumably a version of Zucker herself, seems to have it all (family, education, wealth) but is often left unsatisfied by relatable concerns of self-worth, intimacy, and the search for purpose. A constant battle between living the life one wants and the life one makes is waged heavily in her collection. As an urbanite she writes with tempered honesty:
when I go into the sobering world
of suburbs or country or if there still was
wilderness—let’s pronounce it WILDER-NESS
and see if it might then exist—the disaster
of human progress I have just left is then
inescapably obvious how could i? live like? Until
I crawl back into the peopled hive
& live the only real life I know
read more: http://www.ack.net/AttheAtheneum033115.htm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment