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3rd out of 91 books
—
25 voters
The Wild Iris
The Wild Iris was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1991. Louise Cluck's first four collections consistently returned to the natural world, to the classical and biblical narratives that arose to explain the phenomena of this world, to provide meaning and to console. Ararat, her fifth book, offered a substitution for the received: a demotic, particularized m...more
Paperback, 80 pages
Published
November 1st 1993
by Ecco
(first published 1992)
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In a perfect marriage of concept and craft, this book is a powerful study of how much can be said while paying close attention to the economy of words. Glück's simple lines and plain vocabulary match perfectly with her well developed themes, her questioning of human behavior and our struggle with whether we are a part of the natural or spiritual world.
A subject that I rarely read about in the discussion of poetry is point-of-view; yet in this book, it is the crux of each of these poems. Glück...more
A subject that I rarely read about in the discussion of poetry is point-of-view; yet in this book, it is the crux of each of these poems. Glück...more
The Wild Iris leaves room for interpretation-- the reader is left with the challenge of deciding who is speaking and what drives the speaker. It becomes clear that 3 voices can be heard: a poet/gardener, the voice of the flowers, and a divine voice. Gluck's use of fragmentation and common word choice helps enhance the confusion of self found in the collection. The use of nature is playful and helps take the content away from a confessional/ autobiographic poem to a more open interpretation. The...more
This book has been a delightful read. Louise Gluck speaks to the audience a modern myth through the dialogues of the flowers, God, and the woman gardener (both through her prayers and her interior monologues). What is wonderful in this book is the subtle overlaps in dialogue; these collection of voices are speaking to each other. The garden and its inhabitants are mirrors that of the relationship between God and His creations.
Beginning with the titular poem The Wild Iris, Gluck establishes the c...more
Beginning with the titular poem The Wild Iris, Gluck establishes the c...more
This book is a lovely indulgence. Louise Gluck speaks in turn as plants, the gardeners and God, but the wisdom in her poems also applies to human relations and existential questions. This slim but meaty book could be used as a prayerbook or hymnal. Not a word is wasted, but Gluck manages to paint vivid, impressionistic landscapes nonetheless. Word people will delight in the construction and originality. Gardeners can appreciate the eye for detail for habitats and seasons. Believers and seekers w...more
Full Disclosure: I was assigned this book for a workshop and probably wouldn't have ever found the time to read it if that hadn't been the case. "Retreating Light," one of Louise Gluck's poems within Wild Iris, is one of my favorite poems. (I actually give it to students on the last day of class every year, as it encapsulates so much of what I think about teaching.) After reading this entire book of poetry, I was initially still a fan of Louise Gluck's, but I didn't find myself as moved by the e...more
I don’t really have a back ground in much poetry but I would say this is one of my favorite of my poetry books read this semester. Some may look at it as if it was a book of poems put together that don’t have a narrative story that goes along with them. While others might see a sequence of poems that go together to create this narrative, this book speaks to you in different voices as if they are reflecting or speaking to one another. Gluck writes life experience from several different life viewp...more
Louise Glück’s book of poetry, The Wild Iris is a masterpiece. It is a collection of vespers, matins, divine addresses, and other beautifully written, surprising poems. The voices of the speakers alternate between God, “the gardener,” and various flowers (as individuals or a collective). What is truly amazing about this collection of voices speaking to one another—the subtle overlaps. The gardener’s frustration with her flowers echoes god’s exhaustion with his creations. The flowers plead with t...more
This beautiful collection reminds me of why I secretly love poetry. I don't know much poetry, and I can't say much about it. In the course of earning a degree in English, I had only one teacher who mentioned things like prosody. But The Wild Iris is just phenomenal. I read this book as part of an institutionalized book club in my graduate program, and as I read I cringed every time I finished a poem, thinking "What am I going to say?" "What's significant here?" "How will we discuss this for an e...more
Of all the books I read for this Spring Semester's Studies in Verse class, The Wild Iris was by far my favorite. Gluck masterfully blends poetic language with narrative writing style, making her version of lyric poetry particularly captivating. Due to the nature of her lyric poetry, and the surrounding theme of nature and flora, Gluck forms a lyric sequence which is intriguing, confounding, and sparse. The several voices within The Wild Iris are joined in conversation with each other, offerin...more
This book explored a personalized account of the very delicate subject of faith in God. It displays three main perspectives, which are the voices of the flowers/plants, God, and a human narrator, who is a female gardener. It contains very beautiful imagery of flowers, and how they relate to the narrator's struggle to believe in God in terms of appearance and "behavior". The subject at hand is a very controversial one that anyone can relate to, whether they are faithful or not. I recommend this b...more
I don't have a 'shelf' for poetry, which means that I haven't read much poetry since I joined Goodreads. That may account for my affection for this book. A woman mentioned it at a conference, commenting that during a difficult time in her life she had read it daily. That really piqued my interest, and I was able to locate the book in the local library. Gluck writes these poems about life from several narrative viewpoints: a Godlike creator speaking to his creation of the natural world and humans...more
I don't remember reading any poetry collection as eagerly as I did this one, except for Tranströmer's The Half Finished Heaven, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and most recently a local writer Ashley Farmer's chapbook Farm Town. There's a kind of addictive quality in the wit, directness, myth, and wisdom found in the work. Glück has crafted a fully realized theme and cadence to her cycle of poems, but it never grows tiresome.
The poems are evocative, concise, reading almost like a story or a play. Thr...more
The poems are evocative, concise, reading almost like a story or a play. Thr...more
The Wild Iris was a pleasure to read the first time and proved even more pleasurable upon reading it the second time. The poems within the book are able to stand on their own. However,read together the book reveals distinct speakers who create a dialogue that raises philosophical questions. That is not to say the dialogue is occurring between the speakers. Rather, it is the reader who benefits from the speakers inability to communicate. In The Wild Iris Louise Gluck uses stark images and simple...more
I suppose I like poetry that is philosophical, but does not allow the philosophy to overwhelm the aesthetics. Wild Iris achieves this balance. The speakers contemplate mortality, immortality, revelation, and learning, in a conversation (mainly consisting of speaking past each other) between flowers, God, and (presumably) Gluck. It is quiet, calm, and rooted in both sorrow and beauty. It is the blues of the fallen garden, the reprimand of those who know they cannot be heard.
Look, it's just very w...more
Look, it's just very w...more
Deceptively, starkly simple language enfolds dark meaning. Concepts of death, resurrection, spring in a collection about flowers - can you say cliched? At times the images seemed formulaic, too, the statements bald and trite. Her use of perspective, though, is occasionally interesting; man becomes to the flowers as divinity is to us, and so through the flowers Gluck questions god, at times speaking from the vantage point of the garden, at others as a gardener, the gardener.
"Even here, even at t...more
"Even here, even at t...more
maybe as high as 4 1/2 stars. perfect for spring. or fall. any time when it's a season, really.... lol. so graceful in her movements, and the rhetorical construction of each piece is like grecian pillars--classic, elegant, stirring. It reads easily, but often hits such depths that the resonances have to sit for a few seconds, minutes, days, years... who's counting. has something slightly unconventional. i love the repetition, especially of the matins. an elegiac poet in the voice of flowers. it...more
I was introduced to Glück's work in a Feminist poetry course and appreciated her most, out of 20th C American women poets.
So I stuck with her & followed her work with the intention of observing her style & progress. I felt I was spying on her or studying her from a distance, through her books, to help me understand this woman if such a thing is possible. What a retard.
Nice moments but often dangerously close to poet-ish not poetic. Of her small poetry books I like this one best for it'...more
So I stuck with her & followed her work with the intention of observing her style & progress. I felt I was spying on her or studying her from a distance, through her books, to help me understand this woman if such a thing is possible. What a retard.
Nice moments but often dangerously close to poet-ish not poetic. Of her small poetry books I like this one best for it'...more
MATINS
Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful
are always lied to since the weak are always
driven by panic.
SCILLA
Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we--waves
of sky blue like
a critique of heaven: why
do you treasure your voice
when to be one thing
is to be next to nothing?
RETREATING WIND
Your souls should have been immense by now,
not what they are,
small talking things--
THE WHITE LILIES
Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity....more
Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful
are always lied to since the weak are always
driven by panic.
SCILLA
Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we--waves
of sky blue like
a critique of heaven: why
do you treasure your voice
when to be one thing
is to be next to nothing?
RETREATING WIND
Your souls should have been immense by now,
not what they are,
small talking things--
THE WHITE LILIES
Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity....more
Gluck bridges the gaps between humanity, nature, and the divine, all while maintaining the clear separations and anxieties between those parties. She draws on both personal and abstract concepts to invoke a sense of closeness to the self while still appealing to the experiences and feelings that touch us all. With a variety of tones, from distant to absolutely interwoven, from defeat to defiance, Gluck draws on the communication and separation between these different parties, aspects of a whole...more
Stunning. The voices of the flowers mix with the voice of God and voice(s?) pleading to God. A fascinating meditation on life, death, the afterlife, depression, recovery, Biblical themes, etc., as revealed through the metaphors of these flowers. Lots of tonal shifts--tones range from angry to interrogative to melancholic to peaceful. I think I enjoy Gluck more when her poems use some sort of stand-in or myth (flowers, Persephone, etc.) to get at something than her more direct poems (i.e. her mor...more
This is a beautiful little book, a meditation on love, God, death, and what it means to be human, all incorporated around a series of poems about a year in the life of a quiet New England field. In lesser hands, this would be trecherous material, but Gluck almost never hits an off note. It is the modern English language at its best, a true gift, one that I discovered entirely by accident. God, I love wandering through a good bookstore, or even not such a good one, as long as I have the time to s...more
Feb 23, 2010
Matt
added it
The Wild Iris tells you what you already know to think about life, nature, other persons, when you think about them a certain way -- both sanctimonious and spiritually cynical. She is telling us a modern myth, exposing it for us by getting in the details, the mechanics of the equations. It reminds you that it is a learned thing, not natural at all, though it is used to give meaning to the natural world. The book becomes a sort of fierce, brilliant exposition on some mind-making cliches, if you...more
This is the book I was longing to write, or read, for the last few years of jobless, directionless, lonely, heartbroken, spiritually-searching, and generally-depressed soul ache. Gluck goes to the garden with her "despair", which isn't how I would have done it, but it gets to the crux of my experience. So crucial to have company and comfort with such affecting emotions.
And the craft of these poems! Such care.
I think I heard she wrote this collection in six weeks...now there's an argument for th...more
And the craft of these poems! Such care.
I think I heard she wrote this collection in six weeks...now there's an argument for th...more
I give high regard to any poet who uses commonplace words—it assures me instantly that I don't have to endure highfalutin shit, which really is my pet peeve. I am generally unimpressed when someone showcases the size of his vocabulary. I'd rather be given a performance.
So when the language is simple, only two things can happen. Either I get bored with lackadaisical lines, or I orgasm. The Wild Iris brought me to heaven, multiple times. I admit, there were meh times, but this girl knows how to qu...more
So when the language is simple, only two things can happen. Either I get bored with lackadaisical lines, or I orgasm. The Wild Iris brought me to heaven, multiple times. I admit, there were meh times, but this girl knows how to qu...more
the notes say she is good because she is in neither poetry camp of telling stories or academic. this is true and false, as she is the sort of perfect dialectic of both and neither at once. gluck steps out of the equation as best she can, and is scientific in how she brings god out of her garden. the only reason it is not a 5 is because rimbaud exists, and this is not that. the exhilaration of rimbaud is inverted by gluck, but imagry is forsaken, though gluck gives good reason for that early on h...more
"O
the soul! the soul! Is it enough
only to look inward? Contempt
for humanity is one thing, but why
disdain the expansive
field, your gaze rising over the clear heads
of the wild buttercups inot what? Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change."
really lovely at times. still not my thing though some like 'retreating light' are incredibly good - 'You were like very young children, always waiting for a story. And I'd been through it all too many times; I was tired of telling stories. So I gave you the...more
the soul! the soul! Is it enough
only to look inward? Contempt
for humanity is one thing, but why
disdain the expansive
field, your gaze rising over the clear heads
of the wild buttercups inot what? Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change."
really lovely at times. still not my thing though some like 'retreating light' are incredibly good - 'You were like very young children, always waiting for a story. And I'd been through it all too many times; I was tired of telling stories. So I gave you the...more
Apr 24, 2010
Eleanor
added it
Spring is the season for this book.
Many voices here: of flowers, of woman, of god, of seasons and times of day. I think they are not as simple as they sound at first read. Is a flower a necessarily easy symbol?
Some of the images recur, which is not to say they are repetitive (though the book takes this risk, I think) or a distraction in such a cohesive collection. Some lines will haunt me for a while -- the first line of the title (and first) poem, for example: "At the end of my suffering / the...more
Many voices here: of flowers, of woman, of god, of seasons and times of day. I think they are not as simple as they sound at first read. Is a flower a necessarily easy symbol?
Some of the images recur, which is not to say they are repetitive (though the book takes this risk, I think) or a distraction in such a cohesive collection. Some lines will haunt me for a while -- the first line of the title (and first) poem, for example: "At the end of my suffering / the...more
Full Disclosure: I was assigned this book for a workshop and probably wouldn't have ever found the time to read it if that hadn't been the case. "Retreating Light," one of Louise Gluck's poems within Wild Iris, is one of my favorite poems. (I actually give it to students on the last day of class every year, as it encapsulates so much of what I think about teaching.) After reading this entire book of poetry, I was initially still a fan of Louise Gluck's, but I didn't find myself as moved by the e...more
It takes a lot for me to call a book my favorite (see: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, favorite novel, JESUS' SON, favorite story collection, and WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, favorite play), but THE WILD IRIS by Louise Gluck is my favorite book of poetry as of yesterday when I finished it. It speaks to me on spiritual, emotional, and artistic levels—my trifecta when it comes to reading. I've never been one to care much for "little" books (not talking about thickness/page numbers but the questions a book...more
My first encounter with Gluck, who (yay) I'll be seeing read in a little over a week. Hoping to read another book by that point (thinking Ararat, any suggestions?). Frankly, this isn't the sort of poetry I usually find myself drawn in by; it's not particularly violent, or personal, and certainly not bodily. A friend's boyfriend calls it "nice old lady poetry." I'm wondering how many of the 'nice old ladies' I know sit around revising Genesis...
I finished this about a week ago, and wedged in betw...more
I finished this about a week ago, and wedged in betw...more
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Glück was born in New York City of Hungarian Jewish heritage and grew up on Long Island. Glück attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.
Glück is the author of twelve books of poetry, including: "A Village Life" (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetr...more
More about Louise Glück...
Glück is the author of twelve books of poetry, including: "A Village Life" (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetr...more
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“...whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.”
—
4 people liked it
“I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing...”
—
3 people liked it
More quotes…
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing...”
Mar 28, 2013 08:03pm