{"id":193682,"date":"2026-04-22T09:30:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T13:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=193682"},"modified":"2026-04-21T10:13:30","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T14:13:30","slug":"louise-gluck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=193682","title":{"rendered":"“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.\u201d — Louise Gl\u00fcck"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nIt’s her birthday today.<\/p>\n

Louise Gl\u00fcck’s poetry sometimes hurts, touching wounds or fears and dreads so deep you don’t want to acknowledge they even exist. It feels like these things might overwhelm you if you give them any space. Gl\u00fcck knew these things existed, and she looked at them. She dealt with what haunted her. She dealt with it by putting it into words. Her sister died before she was born, and Louise was haunted by this ghost sister, a phantom presence which pre-dated her. Gl\u00fcck was about as successful as you could be as a poet. A living legend while she was here. She was the 12th U.S. Poet Laureate. She won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and also the Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

Gl\u00fcck’s poems have a chill clarity which can be a little frightening. There’s a slight remove, though – almost like she needs the remove in order to be able to speak – but she’s not distant or “above”. She’s direct. Her language isn’t fancy or formal. She says stuff like “Now let me tell you”. <\/p>\n

Earthly Love<\/big><\/b><\/p>\n

Conventions of the time
\nheld them together.
\nIt was a period
\n(very long) in which
\nthe heart once given freely
\nwas required, as a formal gesture,
\nto forfeit liberty: a consecration
\nat once moving and hopelessly doomed.<\/p>\n

As to ourselves:
\nfortunately we diverged
\nfrom these requirements,
\nas I reminded myself
\nwhen my life shattered.
\nSo that what we had for so long
\nwas, more or less,
\nvoluntary, alive.
\nAnd only long afterward
\ndid I begin to think otherwise.<\/p>\n

We are all human-
\nwe protect ourselves
\nas well as we can
\neven to the point of denying
\nclarity, the point
\nof self-deception. As in
\nthe consecration to which I alluded.<\/p>\n

And yet, within this deception,
\ntrue happiness occured.
\nSo that I believe I would
\nrepeat these errors exactly.
\nNor does it seem to me
\ncrucial to know
\nwhether or not such happiness
\nis built on illusion:
\nit has its own reality.
\nAnd in either case, it will end.<\/p>\n

In Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, Michael Schmidt wrote of Gl\u00fcck: “The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.” <\/p>\n

William Logan, in The New York Times<\/em> made a similar observation: Gl\u00fcck’s work is “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse\u2014starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.” <\/p>\n

Wendy Lesser, in Washington Post Book World<\/em>, wrote: “Gl\u00fcck\u2019s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial.”<\/p>\n

Gl\u00fcck\u2019s poem “Hawk’s Shadow” is a masterpiece.<\/p>\n

Hawk’s Shadow<\/big><\/strong><\/p>\n

Embracing in the road
\nfor some reason I no longer remember
\nand then drawing apart, seeing
\na shape ahead\u2013-how close was it?
\nWe looked up to where the hawk
\nhovered with its kill; I watched them
\nveering toward West Hill, casting
\ntheir one shadow in the dirt, the all-inclusive
\nshape of the predator\u2013
\nThen they disappeared. And I thought,
\none shadow. Like the one we made,
\nyou holding me.<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt wrote that “[Gl\u00fcck’s] firm reticence and her mercilessness with herself and her own experience, in prose and verse, make her an unusually powerful witness.”<\/p>\n

Witness is the perfect word. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\n 
\n 
\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n