Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems

By Louise Gluck

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A haunting book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes

Louise Glück’s thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister’s death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts.

“Some of you will know what I mean,” the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, “all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last.” This magnificent book couldn’t have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374604110

Louise Gluck

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.

Book preview

POEM

Day and night come

hand in hand like a boy and a girl

pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish

painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain,

then they fly away. But you and I

don’t do such things—

We climb the same mountain;

I say a prayer for the wind to lift us

but it does no good;

you hide your head so as not

to see the end—

Downward and downward and downward and downward

is where the wind is taking us;

I try to comfort you

but words are not the answer;

I sing to you as mother sang to me—

Your eyes are closed. We pass

the boy and girl we saw at the beginning;

now they are standing on a wooden

Reviews for Winter Recipes from the Collective

[donnamariemerritt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When I read this book aloud, it's beautiful. The sounds flow and I feel the melancholy and the joy and the hope and the despair of aging. I can't say that I understand all the poems, but the images will stay with me: "...how merrily you stood on the balcony,pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates...""I could hear the clock ticking,presumably alluding to the passage of timewhile in fact annulling it.""...We were sitting on our favorite benchoutside the common room, havinga glass of gin without ice.Looked a lot like water, so the nursessmiled at you as they passed,pleased with how hydrated you were becoming.""There is no one alive anymorewho remembers me as a baby."Perhaps the title poem sums up this collection best:"...The book containsonly recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring,anyone can make a fine meal."