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Photo Credits: Sigrid Estrada as posted on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louise-gluck
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She is an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". She began to suffer from anorexia nervosa while in high school and later overcame the illness. Glück is often described as an autobiographical poet; her work is known for its emotional intensity and for frequently drawing on mythology or nature imagery to meditate on personal experiences and modern life. Thematically, her poems have illuminated aspects of trauma, desire, and nature. In doing so, they have become known for frank expressions of sadness and isolation. Scholars have also focused on her construction of poetic personas and the relationship, in her poems, between autobiography and classical myth. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. [...] Glück is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), winner of the National Book Award, and Poems 1962-2012 (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
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Telescope
There is a moment after you move your eye awaywhen you forget where you arebecause you’ve been living, it seems,somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in the world.You’re in a different place,a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in body.You exist as the stars exist,participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.At night, on the cold hill,taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterwardnot that the image is falsebut the relation is false.
You see again how far awayevery thing is from every other thing.
-from Averno (2007)
There is a moment after you move your eye awaywhen you forget where you arebecause you’ve been living, it seems,somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in the world.You’re in a different place,a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in body.You exist as the stars exist,participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.At night, on the cold hill,taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterwardnot that the image is falsebut the relation is false.
You see again how far awayevery thing is from every other thing.
-from Averno (2007)
The Past
Small light in the sky appearingsuddenly betweentwo pine boughs, their fine needles
now etched onto the radiant surfaceand above thishigh, feathery heaven—
Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,most intense when the wind blows through itand the sound it makes equally strange,like the sound of the wind in a movie—
Shadows moving. The ropesmaking the sound they make. What you hear nowwill be the sound of the nightingale, Chordata,the male bird courting the female—
The ropes shift. The hammocksways in the wind, tiedfirmly between two pine trees.
Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine.
It is my mother’s voice you hearor is it only the sound the trees makewhen the air passes through them
because what sound would it make,passing through nothing?
-from Faithful and Virtuous Night (2015)
Small light in the sky appearingsuddenly betweentwo pine boughs, their fine needles
now etched onto the radiant surfaceand above thishigh, feathery heaven—
Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,most intense when the wind blows through itand the sound it makes equally strange,like the sound of the wind in a movie—
Shadows moving. The ropesmaking the sound they make. What you hear nowwill be the sound of the nightingale, Chordata,the male bird courting the female—
The ropes shift. The hammocksways in the wind, tiedfirmly between two pine trees.
Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine.
It is my mother’s voice you hearor is it only the sound the trees makewhen the air passes through them
because what sound would it make,passing through nothing?
-from Faithful and Virtuous Night (2015)
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