Writing

• Eliot in 1948.
• But her win was far less surprising to those who know and love her work, and who now mourn her loss.
• Her lyric voice still reverberates after her death, in part because of how consistently she turned her attention to questions of mortality.

A cruel clarity of vision

• Before being awarded the Nobel Prize, Glück won the National Book Award for “Faithful and Virtuous Night” in 2014 and the Pulitzer Prize for “Wild Iris” in 1992, among other accolades.
• It can have an icy abruptness; she often writes speakers who have a cruel clarity of vision.
• In her poem “Mock Orange” she writes:
  It is not the moon, I tell you.
• It may be surprising, then, how strongly readers have responded to her still, spare, often quietly devastating work.

Ancient voices speaking to the everyday

• She brought ancient figures down to a human level by exploring everyday dramas through their voices.
• She wrote often of families and the ways they fail each other, though slantingly, as when Glück explores strained dynamics between mothers and daughters via the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone.
• In “Vita Nova,” the way we fail those we love is explored via the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Contact even at a distance

• A book of poems written after a paralyzing period of writer’s block, it is the voice of flowers, of prayers, of the soul beyond death and of God speaking back through her poems.
• In the end, it was this carefully crafted, piercing observation of what is core to our human struggle that continues to animate Glück’s work for so many.
• If ever a poetic voice was honed across a lifetime to speak to us from beyond the grave, it’s Glück’s.