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No poet has grafted her life more stubbornly to myth than Louise Glück. In Meadowlands, this meant voyaging simultaneously through the Odyssey and the disintegration of her marriage; in Vita Nova, the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice provides a backdrop to the bitter aftermath of divorce. "No one wants to be the muse; / in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus," Glück pithily notes, but here, she assumes both voices--the grieving artist and his doubly silenced love. "How would you like to die / while Orpheus was singing? / A long death; all the way to Dis / I heard him," the nymph complains in "Relic," while in "Orfeo," the bard dwells almost lovingly on both his loss and his art:
I have lost my Eurydice,In the end, of course, it's not Eurydice but his own pain that Orpheus immortalizes. "I made a harp of disaster / to perpetuate the beauty of my last love," Glück admits, but this is less a matter of personal glory than it is of sheer survival. And besides, she reminds us, "sometimes / our consolations are the costliest thing."
I have lost my lover,
and suddenly I am speaking French
and it seems to me I have never been in better voice;
it seems these songs
are songs of a high order.
Glück is an excruciatingly honest poet, but not, exactly, a confessional one. Vita Nova holds her life at arm's length, examining its particulars with almost Olympian detachment. Several of these poems include a self-interrogation, rendered in a voice equal parts prosecutor and witness for the defense: "Ask her how he touched her." "Ask her what she remembers." "Ask her if the fire hurts," demands a speaker in "The Burning Heart." Is this Eurydice's story as accident report? Séance? Cross-examination? Elsewhere, her troubles come rendered in a piercing gallows wit. In the volume's final poem, "Vita Nova" (the second of two with that same title), she dreams a dog, then dreams a custody fight with her ex. Be brave, she tells her hypothetical pet--"this is / all material; you'll wake up / in a different world, / you will eat again, you will grow up into a poet!" One senses that for Glück, it's all material--marriage, divorce, life, death, even and especially the ancient drama of myth. These are poems of rebirth, but of a particular kind--not of hope, and certainly not of youth, but of something far more important: poetry itself. In "The Nest," as Glück emerges from her grief, she feels her mind once again engage with the world, thinking "first, I love it. / Then, I can use it." --Mary Park
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
"Surely spring has been returned to me, this time/ not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet/ it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly." Reutrning to the seasonal myths inaugurated in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992), Gluck's new poems chronicle delvings-down and rebeginnings, very much in the way her last book, Meadowlands, took on autumns and endings. Her chosen myth is now Orpheus, her other new interests dreams, dream-states and fragmentary memories. Meadowlands had tracked the slow collapse of Gluck's marriage; Vita Nova follows Gluck into the aftermath: "I thought my life was over and my heart was broken./ Then I moved to Cambridge." (That is, Cambridge, Mass., where some of these poems, such as "Ellsworth Avenue," are set.) Gluck has long mastered the bitter, detachable aphorism: "You saved me, you should remember me." "No one wants to be the muse;/ in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus." To these she adds, now, the surprisingly conversational aside: "Mommy's/ too ironic?Mommy wouldn't do/ the rhumba in the driveway." Gluck also casts poems partly in dialogue, from the terse interrogator of "The Burning Heart" ("Ask her if she regrets anything") to "the leaves" of "Evening Prayers": "Bedtime, they whisper./ Time to begin lying." The poems rely on negative space?on what's left out?and on psychological acuity; their stripped-down self-analyses cast their cold illumination far past her own life. Gluck's psychic wounds will impress new readers, but it is Gluck's austere, demanding craft that makes much of this seventh collection equal the best of her previous work?bitter, stark, careful, guiltily inward, alert to myth. It is astonishing in its self-knowledge, and above all, memorable.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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