Louise Gluck's Ararat

Lousie Gluck is a poet people seem to have strong feelings about, either loving her or hating her. I feel neither love nor hate for her, but overall I fall more on the side of liking her writing. Her poems tend to connect their dots in ways I appreciate, and her writing is often so engaging that reading it feels more like reading fiction than poetry. In fact, I read from a snippet of a review of another of her books that she writes her poetry collections to be read like novels. I am not sure if that is true, but in the case of Ararat, there is a definite cast of characters and a definite plot, although most of the action is subdued, referred to in the past tense, through the haze (or pain) of memory. The book's subject is family, and in it, a speaker (who I assume to be Gluck but who knows) ruminates on her place in her family, particularly her relationship with her sister. To say she was jealous of her sister, and her sister of her, is an extreme understatement. The poems depict what seems to be an almost loveless family. From the poem "Animals,"


we both felt there were
too many of us
to survive.

We were like animals
trying to share a dry pasture.
Between us, one tree, barely
strong enough to sustain
a single life.

I have been trying for some time to write a sentence summarizing the family's relationship but I can't. To say the parents are distant and the sisters are in constant competition is true in fact but insipid in comparison to the spirit of the poems. In short, direct, sharp and biting lines, the collection tells a story that is more than the sum of its parts. Often chilling but extremely engaging, this is one of the few poetry collections I have ever been able to sit down and read for almost an hour at a time. In fact, I read the whole thing in two sittings.

In this review of Ararat, which provides a summary of the collection far better than mine, Stephen Dobyns says that "no American poet writes better than Louise Gluck." I am pretty sure I don't agree with that sweeping statement, but I am interested in continuing to explore what seems to be Gluck's deceptively simple writing. So I am revising my plan to read left to right (ha, I just wrote left to write) on my shelf to read each of Gluck's books that I own--next up is Averno.