NYT Reviews Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night

Over the weekend we came across Peter Campion's review of Louise Glück's latest collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, at the New York Times. Campion begins by looking at Glück's ability to induce wonder in her poetry and to complicate the trope of renewal and regeneration, writing:

But one reason Glück has proved so central to American poetry, for five decades now, lies in her remarkable talent for recapturing wonder. For all her disabused austerity, she remains a great poet of renewal. This is not a matter of optimism, or “recovery” in the conventional sense. Rather, for Glück and the speakers in her poems, mere survival appears a nearly incredible wonder.

Later, Campion turns to Faithful and Virtuous Night:

What makes Glück’s latest collection, “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” so powerful is the inventiveness with which the poet responds not only to her own mortality, but to the entirely new vantage on the world that her predicament affords. This book follows the widely acclaimed publication in 2012 of Glück’s “Poems 1962-2012.” Yet no one could accuse this poet of relaxing into the role of the senior laureate reproducing a signature style. Reading these poems, one feels that all the resources Glück has developed up until now have been brought to bear, and yet, even more impressively, that she has demanded of herself new and surprising methods.

The very atmosphere of “Faithful and Virtuous Night” offers a departure. Much of the book takes place in an imaginary British countryside. The tone is a wintry clarity, with several of the poems rendered in spare prose paragraphs. The main speaker, at times a thin mask for the poet and at times a more highly developed fictional character, turns out to be an aging painter, who is also — we learn at the conclusion of the long title poem — a man.

To find out how that shakes out, head to the New York Times. And for more on Loiuse Glück, check out this recent interview with Claire Luchette.