Title: "To love silence and darkness" : uneasy transcendence in Louise Glück's poems
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2012, vol. 38, iss. 1, pp. [159]-177
Extent
[159]-177
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2012-1-11
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/124311
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
Focusing on imagery and its symbolic implications, the article offers a closereading analysis of selected poems from two volumes by Louise Glück: The Wild Iris (1992) and A Village Life (2009). Compared to her earlier work, the 2009 collection seems markedly different in its treatment of spiritual matters. Whereas in The Wild Iris transcendence is taken for granted, religious belief is conspicuously absent from A Village Life. Both collections, however, are (in Bakhtinian terms) dialogic in their final spiritual import. In A Village Life the ontological possibility of transcendence is alternately hinted at and questioned. In The Wild Iris the axiological status of God is explored in highly unorthodox ways, the poet undermining many established images of God in Christian and Jewish traditions. What the two volumes seem to share is the essentially Gnostic imagery, more veiled in A Village Life, more explicit in The Wild Iris.
References
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[2] Campbell, Joseph (1991) The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. New York: Arkana.
[3] Eisler, Riane (1988) The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
[4] Fox, Matthew (1988) The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
[5] Gimbutas, Marija (2001) The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames & Hudson.
[6] Glück, Louise (1992) The Wild Iris. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
[7] Glück, Louise (2009) A Village Life. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
[8] Howard, Richard (1971) Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum.
[9] Morris, Daniel (2006) The Poetry of Louise Glück. A Thematic Introduction. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press.
[10] Scigaj, Leonard (2002) "Panentheistic Epistemology: The Style of Wendell Berry's A Timbered Choir." In Bryson, J. Scott (ed.) Ecopoetry. A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 117–34.
[11] Stone, Merlin (1978) When God Was a Woman. San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace.
[12] Thomassen, Einar (2008) The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the 'Valentinians'. Leiden, Boston and Tokyo: Brill Academic Publishers.
[13] Warren, Rosanna (2008) Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.