A Village Life

Spring 2010
Conversational Tones
Modern American poetry often seems to have an assured, inconsequential sense of drift unavailable to English writers. The American poet is no less aware of formal patterning, sudden illuminations, the casual, ironic undercutting phrase than the English writer, but there's a sense of looseness, a suppleness to be found in some American poetry that seems very elusive elsewhere. Maybe they just play free verse tennis more expertly than we do ?
This new collection of Gluck's work finds this Pulitzer Prize-winning poetwriting with grace and assurance about human time, dreams, adolescence (especially) and the quotidian rituals of everyday life. At times, there is a conversational, authentic sense to the writing not a million miles from Robert Frost: 'Burning Leaves' (one of three poems titled thus)covers very similar subject-matter and stops short of overt symbolism at the end: 'it is obvious they are not defeated, / merely dormant or resting, though no one knows / whether they represent life or death.' There is a casual shrug here highly reminiscent of Frost's 'Gathering Leaves' or 'A Leaf-Treader' and it's seen also in 'Sunset' and longer pieces like 'March' ['It's a little early for all this'] with very fine attention to tonal variation.
Read through, the poems work incrementally, though I'm unconvinced by the blurb-writer's hints that the whole collection is carefully-patterned. The poems about adolescence, mostly written as past tense narrative memories, veer close to confessional without ever fully embracing the mode: 'Midsummer', one of the most affecting, recalls swimming in an old quarry in the evening, eating peaches, waiting for the heat to break in the Summer. It sounds worryingly like the plot of an early Bruce Springsteen song, but there is no bombast, nor forced rhetoric here: the voice of the poet quietly goes on talking, recalling 'we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing', discussing the daring surrenders, the pairing-off, and eventually, the sense of loss recovered in adulthood when thinking back at those times. 'At the Dance' takes this story a stage or two further, exploring the puzzled sense of loss that time passing often brings: 'how were these things decided?'
The narrative sense thickens when you notice the constant use of the third person, so that when Glück switches to what sounds like a personal anecdote - 'When I'm in moods like that...' ('Via Delle Ombre') there is a slight frisson. Mostly, however, there is a sense ofpersonal displacement at work here which helps avoid the dramatic plunge into confessional. This avoidance of rhetorical technical gestures lends a strangely understated timbre to many of these poems, and although there are Mediterranean references, much of the setting here feels like some backwater of the American Midwest, although this may be a function of the backward glances in many of them. This is a collection which grows in power on re-reading and the quiet insistence of the voice in these poems becomes very compelling.
The Irish Times
'Around the fountain, in the right room' by Enda Wyley
LOUISE GLÜCK’S 12th collection, A Village Life , is a striking departure in form from her usual spare, chiselled style – instead relying upon longer lines and a Spoon River-like narrative coherence to achieve an impressive novelistic effect.
The poems focus on an unnamed Mediterranean – possibly Italian – village and the reader quickly feels rooted there. 'Tributaries', for instance, is a powerful poem of place. The villagers gather near the fountain and there is a sense of joy. The husbands may be off at work, yet “by some miracle/all the amorous young men are always free –/they sit at the edge of the fountain, splashing their sweethearts”. But the mood shifts and we come to see a people “exiled by the world of hope” – the poem suffused with an anguish that is prevalent throughout the book.
In 'Twilight' for instance, we feel sympathy for the exhausted mill worker feeling robbed by work of time to dream. “Living – living takes you away from sitting.” We feel empathy too for those in 'Pastoral' who flee the village only to return thinking “they failed in the city”. Glück’s response is hard-edged: “To my mind, you’re better off if you stay;/ that way dreams don’t damage you”. But for all the tough intelligence at play here, this is a far from heartless collection.
In Noon, a boy and a girl on the brink of adulthood “know that at some point you stop being children, and at that point/ you become strangers. It seems unbearably lonely”.
Thankfully, A Village Life also possesses a wry humour. Most memorable is the narrator of 'In the Café' poking fun at his friend who too easily falls in love. “Every year or so a new girl –/ if they have children he doesn’t mind –/ he can fall in love with children also”.
Louise Glück is a commanding poet and these are rich, varied, memorable poems – “intense pleasures,/ like the figs on the table”.
Set in a village somewhere in the western Mediterranean sometime in the last 50 years, Louise Glück's captivating 11th collection is full of spacious, carefully balanced monologues and narratives. The writing throughout is fascinated by the everyday, along with a quietly emerging sense of pattern and rhythm, of lives shaped and controlled by the place they are born into, of voices that offer variations and meditations on growing up, on courtship, marriage, work and old age – 'all you need to know of a place is, do people live there. / If they do, you know everything.'
In 'A Warm Day', a woman describes how her neighbour, on the first real day of spring, is hanging washing out on the line. The language is refreshingly simple and direct, the voice benign and gentle – 'The birds are back, chattering over seeds. / All the snow's melted; the fruit trees are covered with downy new growth . . .