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by: Louise Gluck
List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780880013345
ISBN: 0880013346
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: January 01, 1994
Publisher: Ecco
Release Date: November 01, 1993
Sales Rank: 121490
Studio: Ecco
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
This collection of stunningly beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive. 1992 National Book Award finalist.
Amazon.com Review:
In an earlier set of poems, The Garden, Gluck retold the myth of Eden; in this sequence it is clear that paradise has been lost, and the poet, Eve-like, struggles to make sense of her place in the universe. For this old and still post-modern theme, Gluck bravely takes the risk of adopting a highly symbolic structure. She uses the conceit of parallel discourses between the flowers of a garden and the gardener (the poet), and between the gardener/poet and an unnamed god. The reader shares the poet's human predicament of being caught between these material and spiritual worlds, each lush and musical, drawing inspiration from both: from the flowers, a hymn to communality; from the god, a universal view of human suffering. The collection was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - ode to louise gluck
There once was a poet named Gluck,
Who wrote all the poems in this book.
She suffers in life,
Her soul is a knife,
I've seen wilder irises, but not many.
Rating:  - I find no logic or meaning in these poems
When I read Gluck's La Vita Nuova, I felt her poems good enough, but she did use the title Danta used. A title of her own would have been nice. But under the titles of Matins and Vespers, these are not prayers nor indications of holy devotion, but cold, cruel, and defensive outbursts. I find no point in these works. Her lines, "Not you, you idiot" and "I've heard you long enough. I can speak to you any way I want" do not spark my
interest. I was expecting these poems to scent out a religious ... Read More
Rating: - If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
If I love Louise Glück, I adore *The Wild Iris*. There is not a single poem in this book that does not move me, speak to me, elicit some sort of positive response. I've loved Glück for quite awhile, and I came back to her recently in an attempt to recover from the events of a particularly devastating week. I sought new life in *Vita Nova* and found merely a hint of what *The Wild Iris* gave me today. I read this book quite awhile ago, and my second coming to it now revitalized me, left me feeling ... Read More
Rating: - Psalms from the Garden
Louise Glück explores the complex relationship between God, humans, and the natural world with startling emotional depth in The Wild Iris, her sixth collection. Far from the strained and occasionally awkward lines and language of her previous books, these poems strive for and usually master an elegant lyricism in the imagined voices of wildflowers; of God manifest in wind, light, and changing seasons; and of a woman who struggles to find evidence of God while laboring in a garden in a cold climate. ... Read More
Rating: - Will I remember these lines?
The poetry we most love is the poetry we want to remember.
Reading here the title poem 'Wild Iris ' and another poem of the collection 'Red Poppy' I try to understand and feel if these lines will be read through once, or will call me back to them again.
I don't know.
They seem clear and strong in feeling. But they also seem abstract and distant.
They tell of a mind, a soul, a consciousness and even one which is shattered but I am not sure that their clear presentation will truly ... Read More
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