Faithful and Virtuous Night

Beautiful, complex poetry to be re-read many times; demanding, like all great art, and like great art absolutely worth a reader's effort. I've read the poems many times and still find new pleasures and meanings. I was initially helped by reading Dan Chiasson's insightful review, which can be found online. Can't wait for Louise Glück's next collection: one to 'Pre-Order'!

Yet another amazing collection by Louise Gluck. A wonderful poet who tackles the really big ideas and meaning of life without fear. If you like your poetry challenging but also very honest you might well like this.

This is a book with a story to tell. It meanders, jumps about and surprises from time to time but if you like modern prose poetry then you will find this interesting.

good

Very moving and beautiful. Lovely, limpid style.

Normally one of my criteria for reviewing something is that it might need a bit of publicity, which Glück clearly does not. But I'm making an exception for this, not just because Glück is one of my favourite living poets but because none of the reviews I've seen of this seem to mention what, to me, is quite a major aspect of it.There are two distinct personae in it, both of whom use the "I" voice. Not all the poems are in these two voices, in particular the prose poems tend not to be, but many are. The first voice is female, a writer; her parents are dead and she has, or had, a younger sister who may also be dead. This "I" voice, or one very like it, has appeared in Glück's work before. The second voice is male, and has a back-story involving the death of his parents in a car accident when he was a young child. He is a painter and has an older brother. For most of the book, it is always clear which persona we are listening to, but the last two poems in the "I" voice, "The Story of a Day" and "A Summer Garden" could, it seems to me, be in either voice, and in the final prose poem, "The Couple in the Park", it is possible that they both appear - it begins "A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone".It's entirely possible that both these constructs are different facets of one personality; also that they aren't. There are motifs that run through both narratives - a phone ringing, a head-resting-on-hands gesture, a sycamore tree. There is also, in the poem "Afterword", a handy reminder of the role of the word "I" in a poem:One speaks a word: I.Out of this streamthe great forms-I took a deep breath. And it came to methe person who drew that breathwas not the person in my story, his childish handconfidently wielding the crayon-Had I been that person?In many ways, this is one of her most elusive collections and I'm not at all sure I have a handle on it yet. Though it has all her trademark melancholy, where some of her best-known collections, like The Wild Iris and Averno, have centred on the fear of personal extinction, this seems to me to be more concerned with the loss of loved persons and, perhaps, with the essential isolation of being human. It's also often interested in the difficulty of expressing any of this in art, the art of words included, and often sounds a note of frustration.Yet of course, being Glück, it succeeds, over and over, in encapsulating a world of loss, nostalgia, regret into a few memorable lines - as in "The Sword in the Stone":I walked awhile, staring into the windows of the galleries-my friends had become famous.or the writer-persona's conversation with her dead mother in "Visitors from Abroad":My mother and father stood in the coldon the front steps. My mother stared at me,a daughter, a fellow female.You never think of us, she said.We read your books when they reach heaven.Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of  your sister.And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger,tightly wrapped in my mother's arms.But for us, she said, you wouldn't exist.And your sister --you have your sister's soul.After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries.3The street was white again,all the bushes covered with heavy snowand the trees glittering, encased with ice.I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.It seemed the longest night I had ever known,longer than the night I was born.I write about you all the time, I said aloud.Every time I say "I," it refers to you.