On "Firstborn"
It is a
Puzzle,
Reading poetry -
A brainteaser book with no answers upside-down at page bottom.
And I am a cretin:
There is something illiberal in my education.
Yet I find the experience irksome at first,
Gradually embittering,
Of reading poems.
The Puzzle's Clues:
1 Across: fragmentary allusion to lived reality (the feel of a shoe, or weft of wallpaper)
(Shards of a New-England-grounded life, plus some trip to Italy)
These are easier for the poet to encode than the reader to decipher
3 Down: men are reprehensible shits
A recurring and probably justified observation
5 Across: An indistinguishability between pregnancies and miscarriages
(These leap well off the page, aspark)
6 Down: a regular contrast of the tranquil with the quietly appalling
The poet's best trait
8 Across: but am I understanding any of what I am reading?
(Not quite, not really, despite checking each page multiple times)
11 Down: ...can anybody make sense of this one?
***
Passing on from that first of Louise Glück's chapbook-length books - "Firstborn", published when she was 24, and apparently semi-slightly-disavowed it later - I thought I should give the other end of her career a shot. So I poked too at "A Village Life", the last of the 11 books collected in her Poems 1962-2012.
(Incidentally, if I follow the implications aright, some of Glück's work from "Firstborn" would run back to when she was 18. She'd've been ~65 when "A Village Life" came out.)
The comparison between the two books is actually surprising. Next to her freshman effort, "A Village Life" reads like a straight-text essay. It's at pains to show up with identifiable themes and concrete cash-value. What it is so concretely relating, is the shape of a life at sunset. There is a recurring motif of the burning of autumn leaves around this small town. We're examining a point of life in this book when the years of action are behind us, and reflection predominates. There are no conclusions much to be seen, just a steely and almost sacredly-calm mode of observation. Not too much recollection of times past, either, just an unsentimentally incidental amount. Mostly we have... a still-life of a life's stillness. (Look, the book's gone and made me all poetical too.)
"A Village Life" is elegant, and austere, and maybe a little frightening.
(9/8/2021)
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