An episode from 11/13/21: Tonight, I read eight poems from Louise Glück’s 1992 collection, The Wild Iris. Following these are an episode from March, 2021, of six poems from her 1990 book, Ararat. A good barometer for determining any poet’s best work is “the poems nobody else could have written,” and indeed there is nothing else like these two books that I know of in English. Among other things, there are great lessons in them for any poet attempting to use autobiography, parenting, nature, religion (or skepticism), in their own work.
Buy Ararat or The Wild Iris individually, or in Glück’s Collected Poems 1962-2012.
from The Wild Iris
- Matins (“Forgive me if I say I love you”)
- Retreating Wind
- The Garden
- Field Flowers
- Matins (“Not the sun merely but the earth”)
- Vespers (“More than you love me, very possibly”)
- September Twilight
- The White Lilies
from Ararat
- Lost Love
- Appearances
- Brown Circle
- Child Crying Out
- Celestial Music
- First Memory
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
Leave a Reply