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For more than 30
years we've been

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privileged to witness the
ongoing work of Louise Glück.

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Her first book published
in that fateful year

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1968, entitled First Born.

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The much praised second volume
called The House on Marshland.

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Later masterpiece
called The Triumph

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of Achilles, which won the
National Book Critics Circle

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Award for Poetry.

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Then 1991's The
Wild Iris which won

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the Pulitzer Prize, and last
year's wonderful Vita Nova.

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Through these works
and all the others,

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Ms. Glück has made an
important and lasting mark

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in American literature.

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Glück's poems have always been
both intimate and intellectual.

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She said today of poetry than
it is to her a language by which

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to connect the
single other soul.

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And as readers of her
work, we have felt

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the potency of this assumption.

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Yet personal
dimension must always

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be sublimated to the demands
of the mind in these poems.

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And in fact, it is
this struggle that

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often emerges as the
theme of the work itself.

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Critic Helen Vendler found in
Glück's earlier poetry quote,

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"A transfixed idealism at war
with a wish for the natural."

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And though this divide
remains in the later work,

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we see particularly
I think in the books

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of the last decade,
The Wild Iris and Vita

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Nova, a softening
toward the desire

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to share the life of the Earth,
and a lessening of bitterness

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of finding oneself the
disposable animal, as Glück

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had written earlier.

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"How sweet my life now in
its descent to the valley,"

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she writes in Vita Nova.

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"A valley not mist covered
but fertile country."

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These new poems
undertaken in this spirit

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are like driftwood,
smooth but long process.

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Marvels of restraint.

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Minimally imagistic,
lyrical yet ironic,

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sung yet spoken, and as
smart and aphoristic as ever.

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The strain of deep blue
is still there, of course.

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Grief, she calls, the dark
wood of which the root is made.

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But here the theorist often
invokes the simple need

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to witness and the
embattled idealist

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wants to go kill opposition
through the desire to be safe,

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and the desire to feel.

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So we may be happy
for the Louise Glück's

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rich and continuous presence
in American culture,

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and grateful for her gifts,
among them her supple rhyme,

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her perfectly assimilated
classical allusion,

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and not least here in
the astringent West

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her exactly rendered reminders
of modulated Eastern weather.

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Please welcome Louise Glück.