Louise Glück is the author of eleven books of poems and a collection of essays. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On October 8, 2020, Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Judges’ Citation
In A Village Life, Louise Glück presents us with a choir of voices whose song enacts and contemplates our human quest for the very happiness that – as if instinctively – we refuse.
In A Village Life, Louise Glück presents us with a choir of voices whose song enacts and contemplates our human quest for the very happiness that – as if instinctively – we refuse. The result is a restlessness that seems never to leave us, as Glück suggests in ‘In the Café’: ‘It’s natural to be tired of earth./When you’ve been dead this long, you’ll probably be tired of heaven./You do what you can do in a place/but after a while you exhaust that place,/so you long for rescue.’ This clarity of wisdom everywhere punctuates these poems which, even as they concern restlessness, are cast in long lines shot through with imagery of pristine, archetypal simplicity producing a cinematic stillness; one thinks of the camera in a Bergman film. The tension between that stillness and the subject of restlessness produces a resonance that builds even as it shifts like thought, like the light and dark that constantly fall across the village itself. As for the village, it seems ultimately to be the human spirit itself, replete with hopes realized and dashed, dreams without resolution, memories to which we return, often enough, to our regret, and too late. A Village Life is a tour-de-force of imagination and artistry, and shows Glück putting her considerable powers to new challenges.
Selected poems
by Louise Glück
A cool wind blows on summer evenings, stirring the wheat.
The wheat bends, the leaves of the peach trees
rustle in the night ahead.
In the dark, a boy’s crossing the field:
for the first time, he’s touched a girl
so he walks home a man, with a man’s hungers.
Slowly the fruit ripens—
baskets and baskets from a single tree
so some rots every year
and for a few weeks there’s too much:
before and after, nothing.
Between the rows of wheat
you can see the mice, flashing and scurrying
across the earth, though the wheat towers above them,
churning as the summer wind blows.
The moon is full. A strange sound
comes from the field—maybe the wind.
But for the mice it’s a night like any summer night.
Fruit and grain: a time of abundance.
Nobody dies, nobody goes hungry.
No sound except the roar of the wheat.
Copyright © 2009 by Louise Glück
Abundance
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
Copyright © 2009 by Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar Straus and Giroux)
Crossroads
All winter he sleeps.
Then he gets up, he shaves –
it takes a long time to become a man again
his face in the mirror bristles with dark hair.
The earth now is like a woman, waiting for him.
A great hopefulness – that’s what binds them together,
himself and this woman.
Now he has to work all day to prove he deserves what he has.
Midday: he’s tired, he’s thirsty.
But if he quits now he’ll have nothing.
The sweat covering his back and arms
is like his life pouring out of him
with nothing replacing it.
He works like an animal, then
like a machine, with no feeling.
But the bond will never break
though the earth fights back now, wild in the summer heat –
He squats down, letting the dirt run through his fingers.
The sun goes down, the dark comes.
Now that summer’s over, the earth is hard, cold;
by the road, a few isolated fires burn.
Nothing remains of love,
only estrangement and hatred.
Copyright © 2009 by Louise Gluck
Fatigue
Like a child, the earth’s going to sleep,
or so the story goes.
But I’m not tired, it says.
And the mother says, You may not be tired but I’m tired—
You can see it in her face, everyone can.
So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come.
Because the mother’s sick to death of her life
and needs silence.
Copyright © 2009 by Louise Glück
First Snow
It’s very dark today; through the rain,
the mountain isn’t visible. The only sound
is rain, driving life underground.
And with the rain, cold comes.
There will be no moon tonight, no stars.
The wind rose at night;
all morning it lashed against the wheat –
at noon it ended. But the storm went on,
soaking the dry fields, then flooding them –
The earth has vanished.
There’s nothing to see, only the rain
gleaming against the dark windows.
This is the resting place, where nothing moves –
Now we return to what we were,
animals living in darkness
without language or vision –
Nothing proves I’m alive.
There is only the rain, the rain is endless.
Copyright © 2009 by Louise Gluck