The wild iris / by Louise Glück.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Glück, Louise, 1943-2023.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century.

American poetry.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 , 2 & 3)

Physical Description:

ix, 63 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Hopewell, NJ : Ecco Press, [1992]

Summary:

The Wild Iris was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1991. Louise Cluck's first four collections consistently returned to the natural world, to the classical and biblical narratives that arose to explain the phenomena of this world, to provide meaning and to console. Ararat, her fifth book, offered a substitution for the received: a demotic, particularized myth of contemporary family. Now in The Wild Iris, her most important and accomplished collection to date, ecstatic imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition, creating an impassioned polyphonic exchange among the god who "disclose?s?/virtually nothing," human beings who "leave/signs of feeling/everywhere," and a garden where "whatever/returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice." The poems of this sequence see beyond mortality, the bitter discovery on which individuality depends. "To be one thing/is to be next to nothing," Cluck challenges the reader. "Is it enough/only to look inward?" A major poet redefines her task--its thematic obsessions, its stylistic signature--with each volume. Visionary, shrewd, intuitive--and at once cyclical and apocalyptic--The Wild Iris is not a repudiation but a confirmation, an audacious feat of psychic ventriloquism, a fiercely original record of the spirit's obsession with, and awe of, earth.

Contents:

The wild iris

Matins

Trillium

Lamium

Snowdrops

Clear morning

Spring snow

End of winter

Scilla

Retreating wind

The garden

The hawthorn tree

Love in moonlight

April

Violets

Witchgrass

The Jacob's Ladder

Song

Field flowers

The red poppy

Clover

Heaven and earth

The doorway

Midsummer

Vespers

Daisies

End of summer

Early darkness

Harvest

The white rose

Ipomoea

Presque Isle

Retreating light

Vespers : parousia

Sunset

Lullaby

The silver lily

September twilight

The gold lily

The white lilies.

Notes:

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1993.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy 2 has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0880012811

9780880012812

0880013346

9780880013345

OCLC:

24627896