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Vita Nova
Poetry by Louise Glück
Reviewed by Elizabeth Knapp
| Reading Louise Glück's new collection, Vita Nova, is something akin to witnessing an out-of-body experience. Like her previous two collections, this new book functions primarily through the use of a heightened dramatic voice and a fierce inward-looking gaze. Yet Glück's detachment, as manifested by her art, allows her the kind of coldly beautiful insight and wry irony that no American poet has matched since the publication of her own The Wild Iris in 1992. Here again, she stretches the range of her voice to include ecstatic utterances, variations on myths, fragmented cross-examinations and lyrical meditations on the nature of the divine. A glutton for abstraction, Glück tempers her penchant for the incorporeal noun with searing metaphysical images and a seemingly straightforward approach to grammar and syntax. Like Persephone, the speakers of these poems emerge from silence into the eternal light of spring, riding an arc of grief that carries them upward. |
 Vita Nova Poetry by Louise Gluck Hardcover - $ 15.40 Published March 1999 Ecco Press |
This last stanza is particularly powerful and multi-layered if one takes into account Glück's own history of anorexia, as we know from her book of autobiographical and critical essays, Proofs & Theories. Line by line, Glück chips away at the mold of the self to reveal its inner essence stripped of the conceptions that define and protect it. The last half of the poem has a feeling of rawness, of nerves exposed to the cold. And notice the obvious lack of concrete images; the only one we can cling to with any certainty is that of the speaker examining her breasts in the bathtub. Yet somehow, the last stanza seems to ring with what Mandelstam called "the resonating impression for form." Although he was actually articulating the pre-lyrical stage of poetic creation, the first glimmer of a poem's music and form, his term seems a perfect description of what happens at the end of a Glück poem. Her closures ring like gongs: they vibrate in the mind, sending ripples of shock waves back through the poem. And for this reader, they do this every time they are read; frequent readings only heighten the effect.In the bathtub, I examine my body.
We're supposed to do that.
And your face too?
Your face in the mirror?
I was vigilant: when I touched myself
I didn't feel anything.
Were you safe then?
I was never safe, even when I was most hidden.
Even then I was waiting.
So you couldn't protect yourself?
The absolute
erodes; the boundary, the wall
around the self erodes.
If I was waiting I had been
invaded by time.
But do you think you're free?
I think I recognize the patterns of my nature.
But do you think you're free?
I had nothing
and I was still changed.
Like a costume, my numbness
was taken away. Then
hunger was added.
In "Inferno," Glück summons the spirit of Dante (as she does in the collection's title, taking from Dante's La Vita Nuova) as she turns to actual events from her life to create a sort of private mythology for the death and rebirth of the self. The fact that she writes from experience only makes the poem that much more pungent:
This last metaphysical image is a great example of what I respond to in Glück's work. Her abstractions are so purely abstract they bear the weight and magnitude of mathematics. Imagine it: need raised to infinity. It cannot be comprehended; it burns a hole in the mind. What's amazing – genius, in fact – is her ability to achieve this using the simplest possible language. Glück can be rhetorical and histrionic, even stiffly so, but here she is completely unguarded. She makes even small thoughts look huge under the magnifying lens of her scrutiny. Nothing escapes her vigilant, probing eye.In my dream, I built a funeral pyre.
For myself, you understand.
I thought I had suffered enough.
And yet you didn't die?
It was a dream, I though I was going home.
I remember telling myself
it wouldn't work; I remember thinking
my soul was too stubborn to die.
I thought soul was the same as consciousness-
probably everyone thinks that.
Why did you move away?
I woke up in another world.
As simple as that.
Why did you move away?
The world changed. I walked out of the fire
into a different world-maybe
the world of the dead, for all I know.
Not the end of need but need
raised to the highest power.
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Elizabeth Knapp is in her final semester of graduate school at the Bennington Writing Seminars. In addition to working as an associate editor for Pif Magazine, she teaches creative writing workshops with California Poets in the Schools.