One particular of her greatest-acknowledged collections, “The Wild Iris,” was written feverishly just after a fallow interval relieved by the act of gardening in rural Vermont. The do the job, which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, offers voice to some of her plants. Lentine loves the title poem for its invention of an insistent iris, a rhizomatous perennial that suffers death each individual slide, only to be reborn in the spring.
“The plan of a bulb stating, ‘hear me out,’ is literally like a bulb sprouting,” Lentine stated. “It indicates a span of time and is inquiring us to pay attention. It returns from oblivion to obtain a voice.”
Glück’s do the job has lengthy been admired for its precision, austerity and psychological depths.
“I believe her poems are coming from a responsibility to converse properly,” Lentine mentioned. “Her language does not diminish or exaggerate.” A very good instance of this, she states, is “The Sensual Planet,” where by the earth is “sublime, indifferent, it is current, it will not react./It is encompassing, it will not minister.”
Lentine’s interpretation: “Don’t count on everyday living to keep you alive, but whilst you’re alive, it is wonderful.”
In her Nobel lecture, Glück built what she sees as an essential issue about her poetry: Her reader is an audience of just one. Her poems are not for collective consumption. She spoke of the affect of an additional gardener-poet in private conversation with her reader, Emily Dickinson.
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