Ararat (American Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Louise Gluck (Author)

Book Description

Series: American Poetry Series | Publication Date: June 1, 1992

A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck's sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father's hollow life and her mother's inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter's belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-strong, deeply felt lyrics are steeled by love and understanding.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck's sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father's hollow life and her mother's inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter's belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-strong, deeply felt lyrics are steeled by love and understanding. The stuff of private pyschodrama is here: a withdrawn, too-obedient child's self-denial engendered by a sibling rivalry; the shattering death of an infant sister; learning to forgive her parents, to love her son. Gluck (whose last book, The Triumph of Achilles , won a National Book Critics Circle Award) transforms these domestic materials into an act of naked self-confrontation in heartrendingly beautiful, uncompromising poems.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In her fifth book since 1968, Gluck writes introspective poems about her mother and sister, her mother's lost child, the death of her father, a family bound by silences, and a need "to make something whole." Family obsessions are offset by a desire for self-understanding: "In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous./ People like me, who seem selfless/ . . . should be factored out/ in the interest of truth." Gluck's "powers of language" seem "wasted" because the mind is skewed by the impermanence of love. Still, one reads Gluck's poems to discover how well she can articulate truths of selfhood. More open and personal than her previous work, these poems offer insights that are painful yet tinged with pleasure and clarified by the knowledge that the price of an "act of creation" is loss.
- Frank Allen, Regents Coll., Albany, N.Y.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 68 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (June 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 088001248X
• ISBN-13: 978-0880012485
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #400,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Her Best Work, July 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Ararat (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Probably the most influential book of poetry published in the language in the last two decades; solidified (and spawned a generation of mimics of) what is now widely recognized as The Gluck Style: spare, unblinking but not unflinching, tough, mournful, deceptively simple. The book, rightfully, that all her other books (except The Wild Iris) may be judged. "Long ago I was wounded.." it begins. Gluck turns away from alluding to a specific mythology (though she runs back to it in Meadowlands and Vita Nova; though, in fact, Ararat itself is a Jewish myth) to read the mythology of domesticity: her father the hero, her sister the Fury, her mother like Dido, herself like Euridice, whose only hope of escaping is to turn completely away. But Gluck was "born to a vocation," to bear witness to the great and ordinary mysteries, the death of her father, the death of a sister, the ache and hunger repeated infinitely within her drama of four, the view of her family that will reduce her to ashes in the act of witnessing. "Like Adam, I was the firstborn. Believe me, you never heal. You never forget the ache in your side where something was taken to make another person." She accomplishes all: poetry, drama, narrative. And somehow she escapes the cheap glamour of confessional poetry. These are painfully honest pieces that she somehow also keeps at arm's length, to examine like an artifact. By all means, read this book. The language and imagery and syntax are easy, unintimidating, and then you realize that she has laid out quite plainly the way people love and harbor and reject one another. "Long ago, I was wounded. I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful Sorrow, July 27, 2004

By 

rizabiz "rizabiz" (Westhampton Beach, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ararat (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Gluck is an amazing poet and one of the wonders of her work is that it is meant to be read like a book: front to back. This book describes her loss of her father and sister and how she has dealt with this through life, with her mother and her son. An amazing work that every poem sticks and is valuable to the collection. My favorite is Fantasy-- which is such an in tune description on loss, describing how one might describe death when they were at a loss for words.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read, June 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Ararat (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)

After a friend of mine recommended Gluck's poetry to me, I bought Ararat at the local bookstore and it sat on my shelf for months. Finally, when I found the time, I sat down and read it. I thought about it. And then I read it again. It is a phenomenal book. What I especially enjoy is Gluck's approach to writing a complete sequence of poems, which she then encloses in a "book." Story or myth, call it what you will--behind these poems is a disciplined passion, a sort of genius that I appreciate. READ IT, I promise you won't be sorry.