Louise Glück
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Considered by many to be one of America’s most talented contemporary poets, Glück is known for her poetry’s technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death. The poet Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.” In 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." Glück is the author of 12 books of poetry, including the recent collections Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), winner of the National Book Award, and Poems 1962-2012 (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the essay collection American Originality (2017). Glück is currently writer-in-residence at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Source
The Red Poppy
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
Published:
1992
Length:
Shorty
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
Themes:
Faith & Hope
Nature
Literary Devices:
Apostrophe
an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem addressed to a person (typically one who is dead or absent) or thing (typically one that is personified)
Rhetorical Question
a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”