It’s best to eat chocolate, I think, when reading the strong poetry of Louise Glück, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature this week. She goes for the jugular. Glück is known for her clarity and her interest in the abandoned, the punished and the betrayed. To be successful – and by that I mean interesting – with dark subjects is a lot harder than it may look. An “electrifying undercurrent” gives her poems power when, for example, the reader understands that she is writing about a flower – a wild iris – who “returns to find a voice.” Survival is conceivable.
Glück, Louise. “The Wild Iris.” The Wild Iris. Ecco Press, 1992, p.1.