STEFANIA ATHANASOPOULOU reads Farrar, Straus, and Giroux’s new edition of Glück’s fifth poetry collection.
“Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.” Plato
The whole. Hand holding hand, as one puzzle piece slots onto another. Body holding body, as rain returns to the ocean. Eye holding eye, as grass remembers the warmth of the sun after nightfall. Louise Glück is familiar with our ever-present search for completion, for our whole.
First published in 1992, the collection belongs to an earlier phase of Glück’s career in which the precise scaffoldings of her style and detail began to form. Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, Louise Glück’s portfolio of work merits the utmost appreciation and literary investigation; Ararat is certainly no exception.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux’s reprinting of Ararat offers a worthy resurrection to Glück’s early collection.
Shrouded in the hazy veil of memory, longing and loss, Ararat endeavours to lead its reader through the currents of a life; a life not lived alone, but in constant relation to the people and environment surrounding it. The collection delicately dissects life’s happenings through the moments which, though small, define it. In Glück’s poems, memories resemble snowflakes landing on white fields; ivory sheets of memory growing larger and larger, becoming the canvas of a life, only to eventually melt into the warm earth below. Memories become wrought in the action of being born and dying all at once, frozen in constant movement.
On inviting us to revisit such moments, Glück disallows us from viewing them with our tried and tested lenses, instead encouraging a renewal of perspective. Glück reminds us that, like her narrator in “The Untrustworthy Speaker”,
“I don’t see anything objectively”
We too have been coloured by the inevitable glass of heartache. With our jagged recollections in mind, Glück’s collection places us back into the shoes of our childhood selves. Shoes we have certainly outgrown in body, but cannot quite let go of in mind. Exploring the invisible strings that tether us to our mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings, and beyond, Glück engages in a masterful exercise of reconstruction, reconstructing our experiences through infantile visions but adult thoughts.
“In childhood, I thought
That pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.”
In committing to this balance, Glück acquaints herself with what becomes lost in this transaction, due to the fallibility of both our memories and hearts. In befriending this loss, Glück engages in a moving practice of apophasis; defining what was by what was not. The voids and gaps of our recollections become Glück’s fruit, the substance through which our poet is able to curate the nostalgic melancholy that tinges the collection.
“Parodos”, the first poem of the anthology, boldly stresses Glück’s thesis for the collection. Our narrator is lonely, “out of touch / with the world”, the image of solitude. She admits a certain anguish regarding her clouded direction, asking “why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?”. However, in resignation our speaker encounters her passive purpose as an absorbent being; “a device that listened”, born “to bear witness” to the happenings of the world that surrounds; adopting an admittedly inactive and non-heroic identity. In the speaker’s ambivalence, Glück mimics the role of the reader. She instructs us on how to read her collection: as brooms sweeping up the dust from its floors, not offering judgement regarding its abundance or grime, only “witness[ing] it”.
Glück’s word in Ararat can be described as immortal; it captures feelings of grief, love, and yearning that transcend generations and never change, regardless of how much we wish them to. As outlined in Ararat’s epigraph, the anthology remains true to the eternal pursuit of human connection. In republication, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux lead Glück’s collection into the mainstream, to stand alongside her other broadly celebrated works.
Ararat is available through Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.