Richie Hofmann on the Significance of Louise Glück's Nobel Win

Richie Hofmann, former Ruth Lilly fellow and author of the collection, Second Empire (Alice James, 2015), opines for CNN that Nobel winner Louise Glück's poems "preserve intimacy, privacy and interiority in an age of constant broadcast, rapid news cycles and shameless self-promotion." More:

One gets the sense reading her books that Louise Glück is a restless artist, shifting her forms, tones, and even voices from book to book. Her early work showcased a radical compression, tight, orderly lines and what she described in an essay as an attraction to "the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence."

 

Her poems often take on the voices of personae, from myth and from history. Though her more recent books record a shift to longer poems, as well as an interest in the languages of fable and parable, they maintain her distinctive and searching attention to the psychological and emotional drama of the poem.

 

As she has aged, Louise Glück has sharpened her poetry's commitment to documenting the body's fragility, the anarchic pull of desire and the resilience of the voice -- individual, lyrical, human -- against the forces of annihilation, humiliation and diminishment.