Ararat

by Louise Glück

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780880012485
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/01/1992
Series:	American Poetry Series
Edition description:	1st pbk. ed
Pages:	72
Sales rank:	290,484
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. The stuff of private pyschodrama is here: a withdrawn, too-obedient child's self-denial engendered by a sibling rivalry; the shattering death of an infant sister; learning to forgive her parents, to love her son. Gluck (whose last book, The Triumph of Achilles , won a National Book Critics Circle Award) transforms these domestic materials into an act of naked self-confrontation in heartrendingly beautiful, uncompromising poems. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In her fifth book since 1968, Gluck writes introspective poems about her mother and sister, her mother's lost child, the death of her father, a family bound by silences, and a need ``to make something whole.'' Family obsessions are offset by a desire for self-understanding: ``In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous./ People like me, who seem selfless/ . . . should be factored out/ in the interest of truth.'' Gluck's ``powers of language'' seem ``wasted'' because the mind is skewed by the impermanence of love. Still, one reads Gluck's poems to discover how well she can articulate truths of selfhood. More open and personal than her previous work, these poems offer insights that are painful yet tinged with pleasure and clarified by the knowledge that the price of an ``act of creation'' is loss.-- Frank Allen, Regents Coll., Albany, N.Y.

Library Journal