Customer Reviews

Wild Iris

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book for a university intro to poetry class. I had never read much real poetry before this class, so I had no choice but to approach this book with the beginner's mind. I must say that out of all of the great poetry we read in class, this book had my favorite selections in it. It inspired wonderful conversation about the idea of God, the capacity for nature to teach us new things, and the way that many humans don't seem to understand the world that they live in. There is no fixed voice here, at times the persona is God observing his creation, or it is the mind of a flower or a plant and at other times it is a despairing, confused and frustrated human. It is not always clear which voice each poem is written in, as God and human voices both sound like the plant voice sometimes and vice versa. This makes the plant voice something like the middle ground where God and the humans could communicate if only they knew how. All in all the balance of the three different styles of poetry blend together into a cohesive whole that really should be read as one related theme. Within all of that, there are images in this book that I think will either inspire or haunt you, or both. This is what I had imagined great poetry to be. This book defies the cliches about what nature poetry should be like and establishes a vivid and beautiful alternative world that is actually right before our eyes.

I loved this book! I picked this collection of transcendant poems while a senior in high school and was enthralled with its poignancy. I was able to relate to the character's questioning of an omnipresent God as well as the pain they faced when considering the possibilities of a harsh, uncaring "other" in the Heavens. Completely fulfilling and a joy to read!

Wild Iris, a book of poems, which allows one to visualize the personification of human emotions as a metaphor of flowers. Louise Gluck author, has masterfully taken us on a journey where time lies between alpha and omega, with boundaries that circumscribe within the realms of heaven and earth. What better way to travel, than through the "eyes" of the flowers scattered throughout the gardens of the world. This metaphor, when applied as reflective analogies pertaining to the essence of life and human experiences, creatively bonds the writer with the reader as one entity, exploring the aftermath of conscious thoughts pondered for insightfil wisdom. As the speaker in most of her poems, Louise Gluck joins us in kinship with feelings of pain, conscious awareness, and eternal truths. Therefore, we are escorted with her through an imaginary garden of flowers as parallel partners of human spirits combined with similar thoughts of awareness. Once this relationship has articulately interwoven its self within our highest condition of natural development, better known as maturity, reality takes its rightful place. perhaps, this can be perceived as the art of surviving the processes of living. I found myself completely enticed, and captivated with this bouquet of flowers, strangely mated with the imagery of petals and sepals used as portraits to describe personal feelings of love, pain and psychological trauma. I find the poems of " The Wild Iris," to be brilliant, intimately filled with emotions, and insightful with heartfelt reflections regarding the complexities of emotional survival.

Iris is an elegant and noble flower even if it is a wild one.Ms. Glück sends us flowers of pain, love and dream.They come in thin bundles but mean so much...

Louise Glück explores the complex relationship between God, humans, and the natural world with startling emotional depth in The Wild Iris, her sixth collection. Far from the strained and occasionally awkward lines and language of her previous books, these poems strive for and usually master an elegant lyricism in the imagined voices of wildflowers; of God manifest in wind, light, and changing seasons; and of a woman who struggles to find evidence of God while laboring in a garden in a cold climate. In poems most often titled "Matins" and "Vespers," the human voice expresses fear, frustration, and love, while "checking / each clump for the symbolic / leaf" in the garden and entertaining the apprehension that God, the addressed "you" of these poems, "exist[s] / exclusively in warmer climates...." Plants, most often wildflowers, counter these prayers, presenting a view more eternal for the accelerated brevity of their lives. Glück's gift in these poems is a capacity for lyric eruption coupled with emotional restraint. The voices are passionate but never hysterical; plants and God chide humans, as in the poem above, for their apparently willful ignorance, but the criticism never reads as self-pity. These poems grapple honestly and successfully with questions of ultimate reality, not sheering away from critical self-assessment nor veering into a merely postured piety. They sing and praise and renew with successive readings.

If I love Louise Glück, I adore *The Wild Iris*. There is not a single poem in this book that does not move me, speak to me, elicit some sort of positive response. I've loved Glück for quite awhile, and I came back to her recently in an attempt to recover from the events of a particularly devastating week. I sought new life in *Vita Nova* and found merely a hint of what *The Wild Iris* gave me today. I read this book quite awhile ago, and my second coming to it now revitalized me, left me feeling fresh and new and able to move on with my life. Thanks, Ms. Glück.

The book is a poetic sequence, epitomizes the idea of a sequence, in fact. That is, this is not a novel-in-verse, like the stupendous, magnificent, unbelievable *Autobiography of Red* by Anne Carson. There is no real plot, no real characters, no real setting. (I emphasize the adjective 'real,' because there is a plot and a setting and there are characters, but not in the traditional sense.) Rather, the poems speak to each other, they converse. Literally, as the book takes the form of two parallel discourses: 1) between a female gardener and God and 2) between plants and the female gardener or, more generally, humanity. It is no mistake that the book abounds with flowers and gardens and God: the creation myth of Adam and Eve in the garden acts a sort of driving force behind the entire book, although the Paradise lost is not necessarily a physical location or even a proximity to any one particular deity. The plot, as far as there is a plot, chronicles disillusionment, frustration, despair, and yes, hope. Most interestingly, every single one of the characters -- the flowers, the gardener, and God itself -- feel the emotions I've listed, and this anthropomorphizing of everything is yet another thread that weaves its way through the poems, connecting them and braiding them into the Pulitzer-prize winning sequence that they are.

The book, however, is more than the sum of its parts: each poem, individually, is its own work of art, and if the poetry were subordinated to the book, most of Glück's genius would be lost. The tone of the poems is unique: distant yet not detached, chilled yet not cold. Critics have claimed that Glück is neither an intellectual poet (à la Eliot) or a Confessional poet (à la Plath) but somewhere in between, and I'd have to agree. Her poems lack the in-the-moment emotional tantrums of things like "Lady Lazarus" or "Daddy," but they are not the universalized ice sculptures of *The Waste-land*. They are not so easily understood (at least superficially) as a Robert Lowell poem -- specifically with *The Wild Iris*, for instance, a bit of background on some of the flowers that speak is required to unlock the poems -- and yet they are not as inscrutable as something Stevens or Eliot wrote earlier in the century. Many of the poems have the characteristic irony with which Glück captured my heart long ago, an almost bitter and yet still amused tinge of sarcasm that makes me crack a smile despite the usually negative thoughts it conveys. Although she writes in unrhymed free verse, Glück is a master of the line, and this book has some of the most powerful single lines I have read in contemporary poetry: "in the raw wind of the new world"; "of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory"; "this one summer we have entered eternity."

An amazing, life-changing book that answers the age-old adage "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" with a resounding, polyphonic YES.

The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck is an intriguing collection of poems centered around life forms which seem to be present in her garden. She has interwoven her own personal experience and feelings into the poem, often, I felt, projecting her views onto the subjects of her poems. I finished reading the poems with the impression that I had learned a good deal about the author personally. On many occasions, she brought her husband and son by name into her poems revealing a little about the different relationships she experiences daily. She has a fascinating perspective on life and the collection is well worth taking a look at.

Wild Iris blooms with spiritual beauty in relationship to those on Earth, to God and heaven. Following the cycle of nature in her garden her soul transcends her flowers, through changing seasons. Her archaic word art impresses deep emotions. A nurturing garden yet filled with sadness, despair, grief Rebirth, Death. The ending of a life cycle.

Each page turns as delicately as petals from flowering blossoms and as leaves of the birch flutter down. This collection of poems by Louise Gluck is much more than a beautiful and moving bouquet of irises, poppies, lillies, and daises . . . As rootstocks bind with Mother Earth Gluck's poetry speaks to God with deep spiritual connection. Transforming mind and soul.

Transcending from Earth, the gift of nature--our life on Earth. We blossom with radiance from the sun's rays and the glow of moonbeams. Standing erect through the chill of evening snowfall and events of suffrage.

Embrace faith to sustain the changing seasons And life cycles. The Wild Iris in mind, return to the garden of life with renewed tenderness.

Her words embrace the reader in one sitting. Enjoy and re-read for Gluck has great talent in which she transforms her words into the same sheer beauty a wild iris possesses. She shares deep emotion for life and what it holds for the mortal and immortal. Her words form lovely images that color a spiritual garden. Gluck opens her heart offering an enriching experience and peaceful serenity.

Thank you Louise Gluck for sharing your words of beauty depicting the fragility and true nature of life.

(The non-poet will be inspired to write poetry after reading Gluck's anthology.)

One of the best books of poetry I've ever read. Each time I pick it up I am newly astounded at the elegance and beauitfully contained passion of these poems. Encompassing a summer of growth, change, and conversations with God in the original Holy place, a garden, this book is well deserving of its Pulitzer Prize, and of being read many times over.

The poetry we most love is the poetry we want to remember.
Reading here the title poem 'Wild Iris ' and another poem of the collection 'Red Poppy' I try to understand and feel if these lines will be read through once, or will call me back to them again.
I don't know.
They seem clear and strong in feeling. But they also seem abstract and distant.
They tell of a mind, a soul, a consciousness and even one which is shattered but I am not sure that their clear presentation will truly break the icy- sea within me.
These lines are lines of true poetry, but are they poetry enough to bring me back to them again and again?