Some of the poems were a little long for my taste (over 2 pages...) but they were well written. And many of them made me wish I could write poetry like this.

One of my favorites from the collection (a prose poem):


Theory of Memory

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet
incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious
ruler uniting all of a divided country-so I was told by the fortune-teller
who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps
behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the differ-
ence? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the
rest is hypothesis and dream. ( )

‘’The streetlights were coming on,
lining the sides of the river.
The offices were going dark.
At the river’s edge,
fog encircled the lights,
one could not, after a while, see the lights
but a strange radiance suffused the fog,
its source a mystery.’’
Cornwall

When you find yourselves in the mystical company of Louise Gluck’s poems, you will be asked to take a walk. A walk that reflects our long journey of Life. The Long Night.

‘’And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated - where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again.’’
Parable

The nights are thoughts. And the thoughts are hearts.

‘’Shadows moving. The ropes
making the sound they make. What you hear now
will be the sound of the nightingale, chordata,
the male bird courting the female -

The ropes shift. The hammock
sways in the wind, tied
firmly between two pine trees.

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine.

It is my mother’s voice you hear
or is it only the sound the trees make
when the air passes through them.

because what sound would it make,
passing through nothing?’’
The Past

The stars are the token of a childhood loaded with obstacles. They are the memories of a family that come alive in the silent night.

‘’Outside, night was falling. Was this
that last night, star-covered, moonlight - spattered
like some chemical preserving
everything immersed in it?

My aunt had lit the candle.’’
Faithful and Virtuous Night

Nights are made of mist and silence as depicted in Cornwall, a poem whose imagery is outstanding. It is a sword in the stone, piercing a heart. Cornwall, London, Montana. The Horse and the Rider, the Cursed Artist. In the night, myths and Life meet.

‘’The street was white again,
all the bushes covered with heavy snow
and the trees glittering, encased with ice.

I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.
It seemed the biggest night I had ever known,
bigger than the night I was born.

I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say ‘I’, it refers to you.’’
Visitors from Abroad

Whether in nightly walks, when the echoing silence is there to keep us company, or in the meeting of two strangers in a park, Gluck opens a door to our soul…

‘’I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or, perhaps, once we begin,
there are only endings.’’
Faithful and Virtuous Night

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )

This seems quite a disparate collection of poems with an often very depressive tone, especially about aging. Dreamy images and surrealistic scenes give the whole a light 'gothic' undertone. The prose poems in the beginning certainly complicate the process of getting into the book's atmosphere, but in the second half of the collection Glück's somewhat more classic, short lines of verse were recognizable again. Nevertheless, this seems to me to be one of Glück's lesser collections. ( )

TRAS la publicación de su poesía reunida en 2012, la poeta Louise Glück (Nueva York, 1943) ha seguido en Noche fiel y virtuosa (2014) el consejo de su colega Richard Siken de «jugar en el barro, solamente jugar en el barro». En el que es su último libro publicado antes de la concesión del Premio Nobel en 2020, Glück abandona las máscaras mitológicas de su obra anterior para mirar desde la vejez directamente al horizonte de la muerte —la propia, la de los seres queridos— en una serie de poemas (que incluye por primera vez poemas en prosa) en la que un sujeto lírico femenino, más o menos identificable con la poeta, se alterna con la voz de un alter ego masculino: un pintor que aborda el silencio y el lienzo en blanco del tramo final de su vida. La niñez y la vejez, la noche y el día, el pasado y el futuro, la realidad y la ficción, la blancura de la nieve y la oscuridad de los jardines, el rey Arturo y el psicoanálisis se unen en una circularidad de viajes, paseos y libros donde el sujeto despliega, con un tono onírico —«visiones oníricas medievales», las llamó un crítico—, su aceptación de la muerte, resignada, audaz y curiosa al mismo tiempo.

After gorging myself in Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012, a hefty volume of her collected poetry, I read this thin collection from 2014. Her normally austere and controlled poetry looks at the universe’s chaos and sees that some of the stories that we use to try and understand the world with, prove to be lacking. It is curious to see a poet who so often writes about renewal, now focusing on a future that could well be about endings, including her own mortality.

A New York Times review speaks of the book’s “moments of startling presence, when everyday facts turn magical, when disenchantment itself leads to renewed enchantment. It is a great good fortune to hold these poems in hand.”

I was taken by the final poem of the book, “The Couple in the Park.” It starts with, “A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone.” The poem then follows some of the possibilities of what the nature of their relationship might be. Granted, I’m a broken widower who sees many things with a wildly skewed heart, but this fine poem and its companions have enough expressed feelings for any poetry lover. ( )