William Logan says of Louise Glück:

The poet has long resisted giving her interior world any richness of description — a poem may contain rain, sea, clouds, sheep, a mountain, yet you learn little beyond the naked nouns. When a simile comes along, it’s as if she had declared a public holiday (I’d max out my credit card for a few adjectives). What she chooses to reveal of this static pastoral lies in the predations or evasions of her verbs: flood, escape, shudder, vanish, scuffle, prowl, stalk. This mimesis denied creates a terrible hunger in the reader — Glück’s intensity is often a form of starvation. It’s like watching a black-and-white movie; the landscape is drawn in chiaroscuro. For a poetic world to be this narrow, the poet’s desires must be powerfully austere. The real world, in other words, is so overwhelming it must be edited.

I think he’s described her perfectly: the reluctant use of descriptive words, the reliance on elemental motifs. But what’s interesting to me is that I’ve been reading Glück for several years, and what bothers Logan about her writing– its surgical, almost clinical avoidance of sentimentality– is precisely the thing I like about her. She could almost as easily be writing about science as love; her hypotheses, particularly the ones that could be personally meaningful, are so suspect.

Despite her attraction to the archetypal, Glück’s always shied away from writing about the hero. She rarely writes from Odysseus’s point of view: she’s more likely to pick sideline characters: Telemachus, Persephone, a garden weed. Her narrators seem to avoid the spotlight, an interesting choice especially in the pieces derived from the oral tales recorded by Homer and the like, which are really the oldest theatres. In Meadowlands, Odysseus is described by his son as “prone to dramatizing/ acting out,” something that Telemachus pities. [I haven't read A Village Life, which is the primary subject of the review, simply because I haven't gotten around to it, but I will, because I'm interested to see what happens when she trades one set of myths (the Greeks, a permanent subject of hers) for another (small-town life, which I think may be equally a product of creation, these days).]

It’s sort of a crank move, as a writer, to pick the peripheral character, tell a depressing story, talk a lot about death, and make it just readable enough that we can’t look away. There’s no lushness there, no wordplay or games or rhymes or cleverness. Just tight, short elegies. This, I think, is why Logan describes her as a “hilarious, in a ghoulish way– like a stand-up vampire.” She’s reliably skeptical of certain things: love, marriage, happiness, a year without a tomato blight. In one poem, she says, beauty is “gagging you so you couldn’t breathe.”

There’s an anxiety in Glück’s poems, which is either a fear of life or the fear of being melodramatic in one’s response to it. Logan assumes this comes from a personal vulnerability or depression, which, of course, could be the case. I read it differently, as a relationship to language that is fundamentally troubled. In “Persephone the Wanderer,” in Averno, she writes,

As is well known, the return of the beloved

does not correct

the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home

stained with red juice like

a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will

keep this word: is earth

“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,

in the bed of the god? Is she

at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words

an existential

replica of her own mother, less

hamstrung by ideas of causality?

What’s happening here is that Persephone, abducted by Hades, ate a pomegranate in the underworld, forever tying here there. Her mother, earth goddess Demeter, retaliated by cursing the entire world with winter until Hades was forced by the other gods to give her up for half the year. When she comes back to the surface, we have spring and summer, and when she goes back to the underworld, everything dies again. The seasons are tied to her mother’s grief. And the poet, who makes herself obvious in the narrative, as you see above, questions even the basic assumption that her retelling of the tale will use the appropriate nouns. The concept of home is as up for battle as Persephone herself, who she later describes as “just meat” in the “argument between the mother and the lover.”

Back when I was writing about couches for a living (remember that? sometimes I forget), I had to sort of come to terms with minimalism as an artistic movement that meant something other than ”lazy.” It was kind of a revelation to me, at least when it came to interior design. I used to look at all those griege rooms and think they were totally unlivable, and after bothering to take a second look, I started to see how actually a lot of neutrals together make a certain kind of sense, when taken as a whole. It’s a palette cleanser, like wearing beige and tan and gray instead of the jewel tones, so that when you see an actual jewel, you aren’t “over it,” so to speak. The movement as a whole, of course, is about much more than that, but to me its attraction comes from the relentless paring to essentials— essentials that, by necessity, bear more weight by virtue of being the only objects valuable enough to remain. Minimalism overwhelms you by what has been removed, by the lack of melodrama.

So with Glück. I think her aversion to overdescription, to purple of any kind in her writing, makes me more likely to trust her as a reader. As if, when she uses the word beauty, or love, or prayer, I have to believe her because the word must have been dragged out of her kicking and screaming. There was simply no other noun or verb that would do, and it feels like a grudging admission on her part: “What can I tell you,” she asks, in Meadowlands. “What can I tell you that you don’t know/ that will make you tremble again?”

So maybe Glück’s world IS unlivable and skeletal, and that’s the point. It’s been so stripped of excess that it’s hardly worth inhabiting. Maybe her entire project is not merely to present the skepticism of the language and expression itself, but to force the reader past it through sheer despair? That may be too optimistic, of course, but in one of my favorite poems, appropriately titled “Rainy Morning,” she writes (to herself or from the perspective of a second narrator, it isn’t clear), “You don’t love the world./ If you loved the world you’d have/ images in your poems.” She mocks her own “tame spiritual themes,/ autumn, loss, darkness, etc.”  But then, the poem ends with “We can all write about suffering/ with our eyes closed. You should show people/ more of yourself; show them your clandestine/ passion for red meat.”