faithful and virtuous night by louise gluck

‘one said, ah, behold how we have aged, travelingįrom day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed The opening poem, ‘Parable’, talks about a group readying for a great quest, who instead spend years planning it and arguing about it instead. The book’s stories are mannerly, civilised and tedious, concerning a rarefied world safely detached from recognisable emotion, and by god they talk about it at length. I read some of the more portentous lines to Rachel, who suggested reading them in the voice of the narrator from Welcome to Night Vale. But the book’s poems about death are lazy, overseasoned and undercooked.

Nothing gives me night terrors like the thought that one day just all of this will be over. Had become an abyss shaped like a tree, a black hole In ‘Cornwall’:Īs though the tree that confronted my parents Or perhaps, once one begins, / there are only endings.’ (both from the title poem). The collection is about beginnings and endings, and doesn’t let the reader forget it: ‘It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided / into those who wish to move forward / and those who wish to go back’, ‘It has come to seem / There is no perfect ending. Some of the book’s epiphanies have to be read to be believed, poems routinely ramble to a halt, and subtext contentedly sits where the text should be. They suffer from serious poemyness the characters say poem things and explicate at length its metaphorical import. It’s a revealing interview, and I’ll come back to it later.įaithful and Virtuous Night draws partly from the poet’s memories of childhood and partly from an imminent fear of mortality, and relates these stories through a very loose kind of free verse, including several prose pieces. Review: In an interview with the Poetry Foundation, Glück talks about the difficulty of approaching your 13 th collection, about the heavy expectations on a career spanning half a century, and how even (or especially) now writer’s block and creative exhaustion are real and present threats to the artist’s emotional state.

Faithful and virtuous night by louise gluck