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

[Daniel Merticariu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mă bucur că nu am început să citesc cu cartea asta.
Și-i sfătuiesc și pe alții care vor vrea să citească Louise Gluck să nu o facă.
Am experiența unei singure alte cărți, dar diferența e semnificativă.
Acolo poemele aveau o coerență internă pe care am simțit-o circulând de-a lungul cărții, dându-mi impresia că formează cu adevărat un întreg. Un lucru care adesea-mi lipsește în cărțile de poezie pe care se întâmplă să le citesc. De multe ori mi se pare că întâlnesc volume de poeme adunate la un loc fără o temă centrală a volumului. La fel s-a întâmplat și cu Firstborn. În prima jumătate n-am prea înțeles să fie vorba despre ceva. Poemele sunt fragmentare nu doar de la o pagină la alta, ci și de la un vers la altul. În mijlocul poemului simțeam că parcă dintr-o dată citesc altceva. Spre finalul volumului mi se pare că lucrurile se mai simplifică și lasă loc de niște jocuri de cuvinte chiar frumoase. Am și râs de câteva ori. Cred că i-aș fi dat două steluțe dacă nu erau jocurile astea de cuvinte.
E și cartea de debut a autoarei din ce am descoperit într-o scurtă căutare printre celelalte recenzii de pe goodreads.
Sunt curios cum va arăta asta în comparație cu următoarele cărți.