A native of New York, Louise Gluck has written numerous books of poetry (including A Village Life: Poems, reviewed here last November), won the Pulitzer Prize and a host of other awards and prizes, and in 2003 became the U.S. Poet Laureate and the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In 2008, she was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.

For National Poetry Month, here are three poems by Louise Gluck.

Cana

What can I tell you that you don’t know
that will make you tremble again?

Forsythia
by the roadside, by
wet rocks, on the embankments
underplanted with hyacinth –

For ten years I was happy.
You were there; in a sense,
you were always with me, the house, the garden
constantly lit,
not with lights as we have in the sky
but with those emblems of light
which are more powerful, being
implicitly some earthly
thing transformed –

And all of it vanished,
reabsorbed into impassive process. Then
what will we see by,
now that the yellow torches have become
green branches?

Midnight

Speak to me, aching heart: what
Ridiculous errand are you inventing for yourself
Weeping in the dark garage
With your sack of garbage: it is not your job
To take out the garbage, it is your job
To empty the dishwasher. You are showing off
Again,
Exactly as you did in childhood–where
Is your sporting side, your famous
Ironic detachment? A little moonlight hits
The broken window, a little summer moonlight,
Tender
Murmurs from the earth with its ready
Sweetnesses–
Is this the way you communicate
With your husband, not answering
When he calls, or is this the way the heart
Behaves when it grieves: it wants to be
Alone with the garbage? If I were you,
I’d think ahead. After fifteen years,
His voice could be getting tired; some night
If you don’t answer, someone else will answer.

Retreating Wind

When I made you, I loved you.
Now I pity you.

I gave you all you needed:
bed of earth, blanket of blue air–

As I get further away from you
I see you more clearly.
Your souls should have been immense by now,
not what they are,
small talking things–

I gave you every gift,
blue of the spring morning,
time you didn’t know how to use–
you wanted more, the one gift
reserved for another creation.

Whatever you hoped,
you will not find yourselves in the garden,
among the growing plants.
Your lives are not circular like theirs:

your lives are the bird’s flight
which begins and ends in stillness–
which begins and ends, in form echoing
this arc from the white birch
to the apple tree.

Poetry Giveaway

For National Poetry Month, we’re giving away InsideOut: Poems by L.L. Barkat. Just leave a comment (your name or a simple “hello” will be sufficient) in the comment section between now and tonight (April 19)  at midnight eastern time. We’ll pick a name at random – and that person will get a copy of InsideOut.

Postings and News Updates:

Valparaiso Poetry Review has an essay, “Lunch with Larry,” by Alexander Long on a lunch with Philip Levine that focuses on poet Larry Levis.

Sunday’s Poem A Day from the Academy of American Poets was “Prayer for Sleep” by Cheryl Dunesnil, from her In Praise of Falling published by the University of Pittsburgh.

Maureen Doallas has a feature today at Writing Without Paper on Peggy Vining, the poet laureate of Arkansas.

Louise Gluck’s poetry has been honored in just about every way imaginable: The Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award for The Wild Iris (1993); the Academy of American Poets prize for Firstborn (1968); the New Yorker’s Book Award in Poetry for Meadowlands (1996). And then there are the awards and honors from the National Book Critics Circle, the Library of Congress, the Boston Globe, the Poetry Society of America, PEN, Yale and Wellesley, to mention only a few. She was named poet laureate of the United States in 2003. Gluck has published 12 individual books of poetry, one collection and a book of essays.

Whew.

A Village Life is Gluck’s latest book of poetry, published in September. It is about the life and lives in an unnamed Mediterranean village. The poems are simple, personal and cover the range of village experience. While they are not narrative poems per se, they are stories – Gluck tells wonderful stories in poetic form.

Sunset

At the same time as the sun’s setting,
a farm worker’s burning leaves.

It’s nothing, this fire.
It’s a small thing, controlled,
like a family run by a dictator.

Still, when it blazes up, the farm worker disappears;
from the road, he’s invisible.

Compared to the sun, all the fires here
are short-lived, amateurish –
they end when the leaves are gone.
Then the farm worker reappears, raking the ashes.

But the death is real.
As though the sun’s done what it came to do,
made the field grow, then
inspired the burning of earth.

So it can set now.

Farm workers, shop owners, the elderly, café conversations, cats let out at night, teenagers falling in love at a picnic, a Christmas dance – such are the stories Gluck tells, simply and elegantly.