Poet Fiona Sampson explains why she admires the 2020 Nobel laureate and picks her favourite poems from a long career
I have been reading Louise Glück for more than 20 years, longer than the many poets whose star has risen and waned in the meantime; longer than I’ve been writing poetry. Perhaps this is why I’m so moved and excited by today’s announcement that the 77-year old American has won the Nobel prize in literature.
But I think it’s much more than this. The 12 collections (and two chapbooks) of poetry that Glück has published to date vary enormously in style and theme, from the domestic and familial stories of her first books, 1968’s aptly-titled Firstborn and her breakthrough second collection The House on Marshland (1975), to the fabular and increasingly philosophic writing of later work like Averno (2006) – named for the entrance to the Classical underworld – and her most recent collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). But what unites all this work is a quality of lucid, calm attention. You read a passage by Glück and think, Ah yes, of course, this is how it is. She has the extraordinary writer’s gift of making clear what is, outside the world of her poem, complex.
