2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
providing a medium for a divine speaker. Meadowlands juxtaposes The Odyssey
against the banal particulars of a failing marriage in an American suburb, allow-
ing Glück to embrace multiple viewpoints and avoid sensational or mundane
domestic details.
Glück continues to investigate domestic life in Vita Nova (1999) in which
she writes about the process of recovery from the trauma of divorce, a house fire,
and relocation. Here, she pays more attention to the simple joys found in everyday
life, a theme she continues to expand upon in the poems collected in The Seven
Ages (2001). In contrast, Averno (2006) is “a retraction of the hard-won truce it
seemed she had made with nature, mortality, the body, and the pleasures of the
quotidian” in her previous two volumes. Returning to what Daniel Morris calls a
“uniformly bleak, even apocalyptic” language, the poems depict nature as malevo-
lent rather than healing, a movement suggested by the title, a reference to a lake
in Italy that in myth is the gateway to Hades. In The Village Life (2009) Glück
again registers a connection between the natural cycles of days and seasons with
the patterns of human relationships. When the speaker of “Pastoral” says, “No
one really understands / the savagery of this place, / the way it kills people for
no reason, / just to keep in practice,” she could be talking about herself as much
as the landscape. But, as in her most successful poems, the potentially narcissistic
impulse of personal details gives way to embrace a greater social vision.
An excellent resource for students wishing a general overview of the author’s
life and work is “Louise Glück: Online Resources” at the Library of Congress
website. Maintained by Peter Armenti, it provides an extensive list of links to
biographies, interviews, press releases, audio, and video recordings and is available
at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/gluck/ [accessed 20 November 2009].
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Glück adopts different perspectives through the use of personae as diverse
as Moses, Joan of Arc and Gretel (in The House on Marshland ), Persephone
and Demeter (in Ararat), and Odysseus and Penelope (in Meadowlands). This
allows her to move outside her own subjectivity in order to come to terms with
death, pain, divorce, and the mutability of life. Students interested in this topic
might look up original myths, biblical stories and fairy tales, paying particular
attention to her revisions and elaboration while also considering how they
inform Glück’s examination of personal experience. How does Glück’s use of
these sources create the distance necessary to understand and put into perspec-
tive life’s losses and difficulties? Think about how they invite the reader’s par-
ticipation by asking us, in the words of Helen Vendler reviewing the book in
New Republic, to “fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive person-
ages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can utter her lines, decode the
import, ‘solve’ the allegory.” Morris’s study focusing on Glück’s use of “masks”
will be especially useful to students interested in this topic as would essays in
Joanne Feit Diehl’s collection, in particular Bonnie Costello’s “Meadowlands:
Trustworthy Speakers” (pp. 48–62) and Diehl’s own “‘From One World to
Another’: Voice in Vita Nova” (pp. 151–164).