Ararat

By Louise Glück

A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck's sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father's hollow life and her mother's inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter's belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-strong, deeply felt lyrics are steeled by love and understanding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063117426

Louise Glück

Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Montpelier, Vermont.

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Reviews for Ararat

[pretear_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At least for me, the problem with reading a poem in the collection in which it belongs, as opposed to reading the poem standing alone on some random website or an anthology, is that the poem's meaning changes. I bought this book because I love Gluck's poem 'First Memory'. Read out of context, it is a poem about my own childhood; in the collection I suppose it still can be but it's not the same. The meaning changes in relation to the other poems as 'First Memory' is the conclusion of the collection. I did enjoy the collection over all, there were a few very memorable poems ('Confession', 'The Untrustworthy Speaker', 'New World', and 'First Memory' -- those are also the poems that I consider to be broader in their potential interpretations). Gluck's poems are more like diary entries or reflective vignettes and most are very particular to her own life with specific references to places and family members. I don't think this takes away from her poetry but for me it makes it a little difficult to identify with them. I don't know anything about poetry, my only goal in reading poetry is to find poems that express my feelings since I can't express them as eloquently as a poet can. Broader themed poems tend to do that more often than really specific, personal ones. That's almost a moot point though, I guess, since all poems technically are personal to the poet and the reader is always allowed to project their interpretations on to it. For example, the themes that run throughout this collection are dysfunctional families, sibling rivalry, future generations, and dealing with deaths in the family. Gluck discusses at length how her relationship with her mother was negatively effected by her sister. That's not something I've experienced personally but I can still enjoy the poetry and project my own family beef on to it.