Firstborn

by Louise Glück

This is the first collection of poems by Louise Glück, who was born in 1943 in New York. In 1967 she received a Rockefeller Foundation grant for her poetry.

Her poems deal in wastelands, the lost lives of cripples, the hopeless and loveless; yet her landscapes have a stern beauty, a mythic size that looms behind the everyday. Arid, merciless, stinging, yet full of life, these are strikingly original poems.

Genres: Poetry, Nobel Prize, American, Classics, Fiction, Poetry Plays, 20th Century

53 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.

Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.

She was 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 Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection, The Wild Iris . Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award ( Triumph of Achilles ), the Academy of American Poet's Prize ( Firstborn ), as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teached as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.

Reviews

[Amirreza Moqtaderzadeh · Rating 2 out of 5]

بورسیه راکفلر سال ۱۹۶۷ به لوییز گلوک بخاطر شعر‌هاش تعلق میگیره؛ این کتاب، اولین چاپش متعلق به سال ۱۹۸۳ اس. درسته که من پیش‌زمینه‌ و مطالعه‌ای که در ادبیات ایران دارم رو، در ادبیات آمریکا ندارم، اما شعر‌های این دفتر، حتی از ترجمه انگلیسی شعرای مدرن فرانسه و آلمان (مثلا فرض کنید ترجمه انگلیسی اشعار آرتور رمبو و یا پال سلان) هم ضعیف‌تره. دقت کنید که عرض کردم از ترجمه اونا و باز هم توجه کنید به اینکه تقریبا ۱۵ سال بعد از اینکه بهش بورسیه تعلق گرفته این شعرا نوشته شدن. معمولا وقتی فلان شعر از زبان اصلیش به زبان دیگه‌ای ترجمه میشه، به رسانه انتقال مفهومی بدل میشه که صرفا چارچوب رمانتیکی براش باقی مونده. البته توی این دفتر میشه به وضوح تاثیرایی که گلوک از ازرا پاوند و تی‌اس الیوت گرفته رو مشاهده کرد. هنوز هم برای من اما سواله که چجوری تقریبا بعد از ۱۵ سال که برچسب “شاعر” به خودش زده، میتونه انقدر خشک و بی‌ذوق باشه. (اینجا خشک و بی‌ذوق بودن شعر گلوک به احتمال زیاد به دلیل ناتوانیه، چون قبل از این دفتری نداره که توش اثبات کرده باشه می‌تونه و با قصد خاصی داری چنین می‌نویسه)