Telemachus’ Detachment by Louise Glück

SHARED WITH GRATITUDE

This poem appeared in Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)

DESCRIPTION

“Los Angeles Times Book PrizeWinner, 2012
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

It is the astonishment of Louise Glück’s poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape―Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain―persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made.” (Source)

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