One of the things to love about Glück’s poetry is that, while her work contains many emotional registers, she is not afraid to be cruel — she confronts the monsters in herself, and in others, not with resignation and therapeutic digression but with artery-nicking knives.
The poet Kay Ryan, in her terrific new book of essays, “Synthesizing Gravity,” writes: “I think it’s good to admit what a wolfish thing art is; I trust writers who know they aren’t nice.” Glück’s work is replete with not-niceness. You would not, you sense, want her as an enemy.
I’m reading the Kay Ryan book currently (and it is terrific), and I was happy last month to read of Glück winning the Nobel Prize. In this blog, way back, I liked to pretend she was an enemy, testing me with that cruelty. Years later, a big book of her work sits on my shelves. She won our non-existent battle. She’s too tough for me, by a mile.