Poems 1962-2012

Starred review from September 17, 2012
Though Glück has held national fame since the late 1970s for her terse, pared-down poems, this first career-spanning collected may be the most widely noted, and the most praised, collected poems in some time. Here is the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Wild Iris (1992), whose talking flowers encapsulated birth, death, loss, and hope; here are the starkly framed family memories of her controversial Ararat (1990), and the careful, self-accusing humor of late work such as The Seven Ages (2001). Here, too, are the stormy, almost overexposed poems (reminiscent of Robert Lowell) with which she began, and the calmly uncompromising universals of A Village Life (2009), where “the mountain stands like a beacon, to remind the night that the earth exists.” Through screens of familiar stories (Achilles, Penelope, Dante) or through overt—albeit terse—autobiography, Glück at once scrutinizes her own life and reflects on the process by which poems get made, the way that we, too, may come to know ourselves: “Like everyone else,” she reflects, “I had a story,/ a point of view.// A few words were all I needed:/ nourish, sustain, attack.” Turning life stories to myths; myths to cool, scary proverbs, Glück compares her style accurately to “bright light through the bare tree,” her process of writing to spying, to silent listening: “In my own mind, I’m invisible—that’s why I’m dangerous.”

November 15, 2012
The poems in Glck's first collection, aptly titled Firstborn (1968), are tightly huddled and rueful: I hear the bone dice / Of blown gravel clicking. In Descending Figure (1980), a more assured fluidity and dark flowering take place without the loss of Glck's hard-won rigor: The sun hung low in the iron sky, / ringed with cold plumage. Eleven previous collections are gathered here, echoing with synergistic reverberations, as Glck exploreswith growing mastery and imagination, candor and wide-ranging inquiry, intensity and restraintthe turmoil of family life; the fever, bliss, and misery of lust and love; the circular battle with the self; age and death. For 50 years, Glck, a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer winner, has been writing poems of formal elegance, psychic intimacy, brainy fusion, emotional acuity, and aesthetic splendor. As intimate and immediate as her lyrics are, Glck is also vatic, summoning the old gods and the timeless myths to trace the human stream of consciousness, experience, and dream. Glck's assembled life's work of shadow and fire, driven by perception of beauty, desire for knowledge, is magnificent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)