Human Voices Wake Us

Louise Glück: Poems from “The Wild Iris” & "Ararat"


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An episode from 11/13/21: Tonight, I read eight poems from Louise Glück's 1992 collection, The Wild Iris. Following these are an episode from March, 2021, of six poems from her 1990 book, Ararat. A good barometer for determining any poet's best work is "the poems nobody else could have written," and indeed there is nothing else like these two books that I know of in English. Among other things, there are great lessons in them for any poet attempting to use autobiography, parenting, nature, religion (or skepticism), in their own work.

Buy Ararat or The Wild Iris individually, or in Glück's Collected Poems 1962-2012

from The Wild Iris

  • Matins ("Forgive me if I say I love you")
  • Retreating Wind
  • The Garden
  • Field Flowers
  • Matins ("Not the sun merely but the earth")
  • Vespers ("More than you love me, very possibly")
  • September Twilight
  • The White Lilies
  • from Ararat

    • Lost Love
    • Appearances
    • Brown Circle
    • Child Crying Out
    • Celestial Music
    • First Memory
    • Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

      Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

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