Nobel Prize Laureate: Louise Glück

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Born in 1943 in New York, Louise Glück who lives in Massachusetts and is also a professor of English at Yale University, is this years recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Glück was recognised for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal” said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award.

Her poetry focuses on the painful reality of being human and pens down poems around themes such as death, childhood, and family life. (Nithya Nair)

A former U.S. poet laureate, Glück had already received virtually every honour possible for a poet, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for “The Wild Iris”

The book is a collection of 54 poems on the subject of gardening in which Louise Glück gives the flowers voices as they pass though their different stages. She also writes about the person tending the garden and the Almighty supervisor.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

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.

For a writer, Louise Gluck’s poetry is an example of the efficacy of writing.

In an article for the Atlantic titled The Many Beginnings of Louise Glück , Walt Hunter cites the openings of two poems and clearly explains why these lines are perfect:

“Illuminations,” a poem about a child learning language by looking outside at the snow-covered world, starts with the line

My son squats in the snow in his blue snowsuit.

Another poem, “Happiness,” begins

A man and woman lie on a white bed.

These two images are remarkable not for their strangeness or novelty, but rather for their ordinariness and familiarity, and for their emergence from a kind of psychological family album. These single lines feel impossible to edit or to make more precise: Each has a figure (child, couple), an orientation (squatting, lying down), a place (snow, bed), and a single color (white bed, blue snowsuit). The simplicity of these images suggest exquisite craft and revision.

Because of the pandemic the Nobel Prize ceremony, normally held in Sweden in December, will be held in 2021.

For more information on Female Nobel Prize Laureates visit my series

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24 thoughts on “Nobel Prize Laureate: Louise Glück”

  1. I was delighted to hear this news, Carol. She is a master wordsmith who writes incandescent poetry. It’s also wonderful to have poetry get some of the attention it deserves.

    Liked by 2 people

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  2. This was such a good choice by the Nobel Committee.
    “Mist covered the stage (my life).
    Characters came and went, costumes were changed,
    my brush hand moved side to side
    far from the canvas,
    side to side, like a windshield wiper.”

    Liked by 2 people

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