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The Seven Ages

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I recently saw a review of Louise Glück's "The Seven Ages." With a kind of innocent wantonness, the reviewer dismissed the worthiness of Gluck's collective output, and flatly declared the book to be without idea, philosophy, pleasure.

In a perfect world, people would be shot for less, and organ procurement teams notified.

Glück strips. She prefers elemental language---hers is a hard-body and athletic poetry---but her sparsity never short-changes emotional impact, borealistic or far subtler. To wit, from "Youth;"

"My sister and I at two ends of the sofa,
reading (I suppose) English novels.
The television on; various schoolbooks open,
or places marked with sheets of lined paper.
Euclid, Pythagoras. As though we had looked into
the origin of thought and preferred novels."

Her subject matter, if not the whole of the world and us in it, frequently takes the form of love---real love, passionate love, the opiate kind come riding zephyrs, powerful enough to border hystericism, such is its biological power. This focus also includes at times the unhappy aftermath, such as is found in "The Balcony":

"It was a night like this, at the end of summer.

We had rented, I remember, a room with a balcony.
How many days and nights? Five, perhaps-no more.

Even when we weren't touching we were making love.
We stood on our little balcony in the summer night.
And off somewhere, the sounds of human life.

We were the soon to be anointed monarchs,
well disposed to our subjects. Just beneath us,
sounds of a radio playing, an aria we didn't in those years know.

Someone dying of love. Someone from whom time had taken
the only happiness, who was alone now,
impoverished, without beauty.

The rapturous notes of an unendurable grief, of isolation and terror,
the nearly impossible to sustain slow phrases of the ascending figures-
they drifted out over the dark water
like an ecstasy.

Such a small mistake. And many years later,
the only thing left of that night, of the hours in that room."

We get the whole of it: the event experienced, the event witnessed, the event's ramifications as prophecy, and finally the unretainable ecstasy and brutal wisdom of the high-country moment, returned to everyday living, so far as possible. Contrary to unpopular opinion, Glück's latest work makes the most of idea and philosophy and pleasure, embodied in its paced and quiet understatement, signifying its origins in the truly genuine. The Seven Ages rings with the sharp strike of the authentic, rarely sinking into the echoes of sentimentality.

Really, is another round of balloting necessary to induct Glück into a mythical poetry hall of fame? This one goes on the first ballot.

Read the book. More ripe delights await.

Salient in this book is Louise Gluck's absolute brilliant mastery of every aspect of poetry. She said somewhere that this was her weirdest book yet. It's not among the most experimental poetry published today; it's unique great Louise Gluck. Every word in every poem feels like a monumental perfection.

I hope this review has been helpful to you.

The Seven Ages is another amazing collection by Louise Gluck. Disagreeing with what is said in the blurb of my Carcanet edition, which says this book is the "strangest" and "most bold" (to date of publication), a lot of poems in The Seven Ages are relatively more accessible than those in Wild Iris.

Readers have to slow down to read Louise Gluck to enjoy how the poet inserts pauses and controls the rhythm of her works, therefore focusing on the key element on each line, be it a verb, a noun, or even a punctuation mark. This is what I fall in love with her poetry after reading A Village Life, her latest full-length collection. I could allow myself some quiet time and be guided by her craft and wisdom.

The first half of the book contains many strong pieces, while a few in the second half (which I less like) are a bit convoluted or could further be tightened in my personal views. Yet, just reading how Gluck opens her poems and the way she jungles simple poetic diction is enlightening. My favorite examples from The Seven Ages include:

"I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way / and like everyone I called that accomplishment" ("The Seven Ages")

"And from out of nowhere lovers came, / people who still had bodies and hearts. Who still had / arms, legs, mouths, although by day they might be / housewives and businessmen." ("Moonbeam")

"Familiar, recognizable, but much more deeply alone, more despondent. / She does not, in her view, meet the definition / of child, a person with everything to look forward to." ("Birthday")

"We had only a few days, but they were very long." ("The Destination")

"Even when we weren't touching we were making love." ("The Balcony")

"Sickness, gray rain. The dogs slept through it. They slept on the bed, / at the end of it, and it seems to me they understood / about childhood: best to remain unconscious." ("Time")

I would like to say particularly how much I love the Carcanet edition I have ordered. The book is slimmer than usual and the fonts are smaller , but it is exactly why I love Gluck's poetry more - compact, solid, something you hold in your hand, but you have to look up from the book, gazing into distance to think about what she really wants you to know about words.

Louise Glück's 2001 poetry collection The Seven Ages features the style readers have come to expect from her: a somewhat simple writing style, a confessional style, and a strong point of view. The collection opens with several poems dedicated to the travails of growing older. The regret of forgotten dreams and the realization of death dominate the first quarter of the collection and infuse throughout the collection.

However, Glück's obsession with growing older brings her back to childhood the topic of much of the rest of the collection. It is through her childhood memories that Glück recognizes the unmovable force of time. In "Radium," Glück writes:

"And then fall was gone, the year was gone.
We were changing, we were growing up. But
it wasn't something you decided to do;
it was something that happened, something
you couldn't control."

This glimpse into childhood and the loss of times gone by is something of which everyone can relate from young adults to senior citizens.

Permeating through the entirety of the collection is nature and the impact on our memories. In "Ripe Peach," Glück celebrates the joys of life through the simple enjoyment of a ripe piece of fruit. In "Copper Beech," Glück remembers her childhood through a single tree from her childhood home. In fact, the tree finds its way into a few other poems to resonate its importance.

The overarching themes of Glück's collection make it a nice read with no really jarring changes in theme. Glück experiments a little with style but nothing overly experimental.

Louise Gluck has quietly become one of our greatest poets, building an impressive, meticulous body of work since the mid-1970s. The fact that she's also a winner of just about every major poetry award, pales in comparison to the naked searching, the brave confrontations, and the hard-won, deeply resonant wisdom her poems uncover. Deceptively simple, Gluck's diamond-cut lines encompass a vocabulary refined to the simplest -- purest -- of objects and emotions, that when repeated gain a kind of elusive, opaque mystery. Whether the subject is herself, her older sister, her lovers, time, memory, desire, or death, the cumulative effect is nearly catechismal -- and, indeed, reading Gluck is like going to church.

Louise Gluck's latest collection of poems reveal a new cadence to her voice.There is a directness of speech and lack of opacity which is new to her work.The poems as previously in her work inhabit the world of the reflective thoughtful person sighing in the noisy world .Memories and feelings for the past ,present and future beg to have sense made of them.I was struck by the description of seemingly endless days spent in her childhood on Long Island where time almost began to cease to exist.This is an excellent book don't miss it.

Louise Gluck never backs off--she takes risks. Rather than stay on the safe, "winner's" path, she veers, speeds, slows down, makes the curves--each book a little different, each focus a new one.

Louis Gluck brings something delicious and new to the table each time.

Her fearlessness is exciting!

Let's break this down. Louise Gluck's reputation precedes her poetry, so much so that I persuaded myself into buying this book, sayiing "It must be good."

There are good lines:
"Time was moving in one direction, like a wave lifting
the whole house, the whole village."

but the same poem (Radium) includes the shockingly cliche and ineffective:
"we were growing up. But
it wasn't something you decided to do;
it was something that happened, something
you couldn't control."

Really, Gluck? You give us an absolute gorgeous poem like "Ancient Text" in which "night and day, angels were/ discussing my meanings. Night and Day, I revised my appeals...I spoke only to angels." More gorgeous lines like "when I didn't move I was more perfect."

Really, Gluck? You couldn't give us consistently good poems? Her strength--her simplicity, the way she constructs lightning-quick intelligent statements--ultimately turns into her weakness: flat, meaningless lines that sink into their own prosaic predictability. Some of the reviews for some reason mention Plath. I wouldn't want Gluck to go that far in her style (I'm not a fan of Plath's--shoot me). But in this collection, I could have done with more energy and not so many declarative monotonous poems.

I was disappointed in this collection, though there are some great poems in here. Buy if you can, get a copy of it cheap and read poems like "Summer at the Beach," "Ancient Texts" "Youth" and "Ripe Peach" and "Unpainted Door."

We must have higher standards for ourselves, though I really admire her commitment to intellectualism--a rarity in contemporary American poetry.

Better luck next time, Louise.

I know Gluck has won all kinds of awards and honors, but to be honest, I found this collection to be mediocre (though her poem "Youth" is pretty good). It isn't bad, but it isn't something that I'd recommend anyone run out and buy.

Louise Gluck's last book, Vita Nova, had a spare brilliance about it, like a brightly lit room. One knew one was in the country of love newly discovered and savored, lost and comemorated. Yet the poems of The Seven Ages, it would seem from a selection of 18 poems in the January-February 2001 American Poetry Review, have cluttered a landscape that gave pleasure for its having changed little. The dominant theme or subject is difficult to determine given poems about family, unrequited love and nature as metaphor for adolescent pain. This would not be a problem if the quality were consistent throughout. The nearly religious tone one has come to expect in Gluck's poems dealing with identity and nature is present, and in excellent form. "The windows shut, the sun rising./ Sounds of a few birds,/ the garden filmed with a light moisture./ And the insecurity of great hope/ suddenly gone./ And the heart still alert." ("The Muse of Happiness") But this same minute description of things that seem motionless and graceful undoes itself in a different poem when it is followed by uncharacteristically vague language. "The curtains parted. Light/ coming in. Moonlight, then sunlight./ Not changing because time was passing/ but becuase the one moment had many aspects." ("Island") It seems we should be impressed by this transformation of moonlight to sunlight, but what are the conditions that would allow it to do so? Some of the colleciton's best poems would probably be those about the relationship between two sisters. They threaten, at times, to dive over the edge into a simple indictment of a painful childhood, as in the poem "Mother and Child." But it is Gluck's description that maintains the reader's interest, as in lines about nail-polish:

"My sister shook the bottle. The orange/ kept sinking to the bottom; maybe/ that was the problem./ She shook it over and over, held it up to the light,/ studied the words in the magazine." ("August") After a trim collection like Vita Nova, which was wrongly passed up for any of the three major literary awards (The National Book Award, The Pulitzer and The National Book Critics Circle Award), one would expect a similar follow-up, concise and richly suggestive. The Seven Ages may turn out to be disappointingly uneven.