English Text by Selina Lum

The poet Louise Glück has proudly become the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for Literature since Toni Morrison after 27 years, recognized for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award.

 

Photo Courtesy of Sigrid Estrada.


Louise Glück, born 1943 in New York, lives in Massachusetts and is also professor of English as resident writer at Yale University. One of America’s leading poets, the 77-year-old writer has won a myriad of worldwide recognized awards: Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award. Her poetry focuses on the painful reality of being human, tackling themes such as death, childhood, and the nature of life – often family life. For many recognized poets in their countries, few poets achieve true fame with the public in their own lifetime. But Louise Glück has been awarded almost every prize an American poet might hope for. Glück seeks universal, and in this she takes inspiration from Greek mythology and classical motifs, such as Persephone and Eurydice who are often the victims of betrayal, to present in most of her works.

 

The American poet Louise Glück is the 2020 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Photo courtesy of Katherine Wolkoff.

Glück has been hailed by the Nobel Prize committee For her “candid and uncompromising” voice, which is “full of humour and biting wit”. She made her literary debut with ‘Firstborn’ in 1968. Glück’s publications of 12 collections of poetry, including her most recent Faithful and Virtuous Night, the Pulitzer-winning The Wild Iris, are characterised by a striving for clarity, a striving to understand complex and painful family relations, “an austere, playful intelligence, and a refined sense of conversation.” Glück stays true to her works with severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of truth. 

To sample her work, head for the short lyric Nostos (a Greek term meaning Homecoming).

The first lines are characteristic, being about memory:

“There was an apple tree in the yard —

this would have been

forty years ago…”

And the powerful last lines state one of her strongest beliefs:

“We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.”


What the Academy seems to have done is they’ve expressed the acclamation to a woman poet who is, in a sense, aesthetically, imaginatively, in no way a voice for any cause – she is a human being engaged in the language and in the world. There exists this wonderful sense that Glück is polemical that she would bring the reality and the core of truth to the surface. Glück’s collections of poetry does not persuade readers of anything, but helping readers to explore the world we human live in. The voice is really about the individual human being alive in the world, and in the language.

At last, this a poem called Snow Drops by the brilliant Louise Gluck. It is so sentimental to the degree of heart-rending, somberness and solemnity, but the twist is about recovery. At the end, the last line became an epitome of her poetic excellence.

Snow Drops by Louise Glück:

Do you know what I was, how I lived?  You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring–
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

-from The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück