"To love silence and darkness" : uneasy transcendence in Louise Glück's poems

Focusing on imagery and its symbolic implications, the article offers a closereading analysis of selected poems from two volumes by Louise Glück: The Wild Iris (1992) and A Village Life (2009). Compared to her earlier work, the 2009 collection seems markedly different in its treatment of spiritual matters. Whereas in The Wild Iris transcendence is taken for granted, religious belief is conspicuously absent from A Village Life. Both collections, however, are (in Bakhtinian terms) dialogic in their final spiritual import. In A Village Life the ontological possibility of transcendence is alternately hinted at and questioned. In The Wild Iris the axiological status of God is explored in highly unorthodox ways, the poet undermining many established images of God in Christian and Jewish traditions. What the two volumes seem to share is the essentially Gnostic imagery, more veiled in A Village Life, more explicit in The Wild Iris.