Gluck, a former Poet Laureate of the U.S., a professor at Yale and Stanford, and a neighbor in Cambridge, won the Nobel Prize in 2020 “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” This is her first volume after that prestigious recognition and it doesn’t disappoint.

The book has a beautiful, subtle cover, a painting of a small chick from the Shanghai Art Museum and a text of Chinese characters (?Japanese) characters with a chop in the upper right hand corner.  It is typical of Gluck that there is no explanation or translation of the text or the painting—-there they are; make of them what you will; here is beauty, what else do you need?

The poems carry on with that attitude and beauty for Gluck’s writing career topics—-time, aging, death, family, friends, and art.  She artfully and quietly combines and recombines those themes to jar the reader out of his/her quiet.  As she writes in ‘A Children’s Story’ about a family returning to the city after a day in the country:  “What a sad day the day has become./ Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away;/ they look calm, but calm is not the truth./Despair is the truth.  This is what/ mother and father know. All hope is lost./ We must return to where it was lost/ if we want to find it again.”  Yikes, so much for a quiet family car ride in the countryside!

And then there’s her poem ‘Autumn’–-“The part of life/devoted to contemplation/was at odds with the part/committed to action./  Fall was approaching./But I remember/ it was always approaching,/ once school ended./  Life, my sister said,/ is like a torch passed now/ from the body to the mind./ Sadly, she went on, the mind is not/there to receive it.”  More grim news!

You get the idea.  These are not cheery poems but they’re poems to make you think and re-think those assumptions you’ve made about life, and happiness, and isn’t that the purpose of great art?   This slim volume, Gluck’s 13th, should further solidify this Vermont poet’s position as one of our great artists.