Louise Glück, the American poet and Nobel laureate who died last week, was repeatedly drawn to stories about families. Her last published book was a short novel about twins in their first year, Marigold and Rose. And children appear throughout her 1975 book, The House on Marshland, in which she developed her instantly recognizable intimate voice. By placing children and mothers, in particular, at the center of her poems, Glück explored a world made of equal parts myth and reality, sketched out by her precise, timeless language.

When I learned that Glück had died, I found myself drawn first to “The School Children,” which begins with a trip to school:

The children set forth with their little satchels

And then switches to the home:

And all morning the mothers have labored

To gather the late apples, red and gold,

Like words of another language.

Glück places us in a familiar setting—almost like a picture-book—but the somewhat formal language of the poem (“set forth,” “have labored/to gather”) introduces a degree of unease, as if we’re reading a translation. The poem next introduces the teachers, and through them acquires mythical dimensions, with the teachers becoming almost like gods: they’re waiting “on the other shore” “behind great desks” “to receive these offerings.” The reader cannot help but worry a little about the trip the children are taking and whether they’ll be able to cross over. Suddenly, it seems like a long way to get there.

Reassuringly, the poem zooms into the smallest details of the school: the nails on which the children hang their “overcoats of blue or yellow wool.” The colors of the overcoats, and of the apples in the first stanza, stand out like the colors in a beautifully drawn children’s book by Barbara Cooney or Dick Bruna or Eric Carle (my personal favorite: Louhi, Witch of North Farm). But then, we come to learn in the last stanza, the mothers are in danger too:

And the teachers shall instruct them in silence

and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out,

drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees

bearing so little ammunition.

The world has been reduced, or simplified, to three groups of characters: teachers, mothers, and children. Those figures have been magnified and enlarged. The mothers are determined, desperate, and trapped. Instead of holding their children, they clutch the branches of the dead orchard trees. The children may be in danger and the mothers cannot protect them, or even get to them. The teachers, meanwhile, are offering a sober lesson for which there are no words.  

Like the best children’s books, and the most gripping fairy-tales, Glück’s poems do not present an innocent, uniformly happy vision of childhood—or of family relations. Take “Gretel in Darkness,” for example, which comes from the same volume. Gretel appears to the reader after she and Hansel escape from the witch. “This is the world we wanted,” Gretel says in the first line of the poem. But this odd sequel to the Grimm tale goes immediately haywire. Gretel is traumatized, can’t forget the witch, stays locked in the house because her father bars the doors. And “no one remembers,” “not even” Hansel, whom she fears is about to move out. “But I killed for you,” Gretel says to her brother, and a voice in my head says the same thing to my sister, though I never have. Gretel insists to Hansel that “we are there still and it is real, real/that black forest and the fire in earnest.”

Glück casts the lives of Gretel—and of Moses, Jesus, Achilles, Joan of Arc—into language that bridges the world of myth or ancient history or fairy-tale and the world of our present. Her preferred stories are ones in which the danger of abandonment and the repression of mourning threaten an intergenerational future. She does not spare her own family this treatment. “Still Life” tells of a family that condenses into the space of a lyric poem the epic canvas of a nineteenth-century novel like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks:

Father has his arm around Tereze.

She squints. My thumb

is in my mouth: my fifth autumn.

Near the copper beech

the spaniel dozes in shadows.

Not one of us does not avert his eyes.

Across the lawn, in full sun, my mother

stands behind her camera.

This poem is a manifesto, an ars poetica, a recipe for a poem. Its elements: family, time, place. And something else: “not one of us does not avert his eyes.” We cannot look at what is right in front of us. I kept asking myself why the poem ends with the mother taking the picture—instead of beginning with that detail. Then I realized why: until that moment, the poet had been occupying the place of the mother. It is she, the poet, who stands behind the camera. Like “The School Children,” this poem is deep with an honest despair about mothers and children—why are we unable to avert our eyes from what we love?—but also with a poignant realization that the poet has taken the place of her mother. Glück, who was raising her young child when the book was published, may have had that substitution on her mind.

Here it might be worth pointing out that The House on Marshland was published just after Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) and before Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III (1976). Like Robert Lowell’s earlier Life Studies (1959), these three books explore how an ordinary life might be brought into poetic form without reducing the poem to mere autobiography.

Glück wrote about walks to school and family photographs and tried to understand what prompts people to avert their eyes from life’s ordinary and inevitable losses and griefs. From Meadowlands to Averno, Glück returned again and again to the scene of despair, of a foreclosed future, of an irrevocable decision: Persephone’s descent to hell, Achilles’s rage, the apple taken from the tree of knowledge, the unseen unhappiness that shadows every smiling family photo. Her poems can be despairing, foreboding, vigilant, and deeply affectionate, somehow all at once.

Glück read mythology, she read the Bible, and she understood how hung up we can be on confusing feelings and contradictory desires. She took Genesis and wrote a poem called “The Garden” and set the clock ticking on two people who think their marriage is going to last: “And they think/they are free to overlook/this sadness.” What sadness? All they’re doing, the two young people, is planting some peas as it starts to rain. Yet the garden itself says: “I can hardly bear to look at [the scene].” She had the ability to see bare reality in mythological terms (they are heroic for thinking that their happiness will last). She was equally good at cracking open the myth to find the humble reality at its core (the story of Adam and Eve happens every day in every suburb, every garden).

But while her poems stare straight into sadness, they do not leave us without recourse. Nor do they feel hopeless, despite recurring themes of darkness. In a late, gorgeous poem titled “A Children’s Story,” a King, a Queen, and a bunch of little princesses are “tired of rural life” and have decided to return to the city, to society. But they are frightened by that great unknown, the future, which the children, not the parents, will have to inhabit. The thought leaves them all sad and shaken, but also determined:

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.

Reading “A Children’s Story” and “The School Children” the day of Glück’s death, I did what I always do with poems that move me. I texted them to my infinitely patient friends and colleagues, and to my partner. Finally, for good measure, I sent the poems to all the students in my class on twentieth-century poetry. “Read these for Monday!!” I wrote. “She was kind to me once when I was younger and lost,” I added childishly, picking up my satchel.

When I was a college student myself, I once heard Glück give a reading of her book The Seven Ages. I was pinned to my seat for the entire reading. To me, her voice carried a moral intelligence that I found lacking elsewhere (although Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Jorie Graham all have a similar effect on me). It has taken me until the day she died to see that this voice carried a singular trust that language can guide us to the places where hope was lost, or in danger of being lost. Her poems contain very few historical markers that would link them to a particular time or place. But this absence of context has the paradoxical effect of tugging the poems closer to us, making them into apt vehicles to share, to think about, to live inside.

Poetic language, for Glück, is not hyperbole, effusiveness, or evasion, but a forensic investigation into the loss of hope and into the origins of despair. The beautiful poem “Gemini” includes Glück’s description of her own childhood, a set of brief, exacting brushstrokes:

So the past put forth

a house filled with

asters and white lilac

a child

in her cotton dress

the lawn, the copper beech—

Glück rarely fell under the spell of the things that can make twentieth-century poetry so challenging to some (and, to others, enchantingly difficult). Does a word really refer to a thing? Does breaking the structure of a sentence disrupt reality? Those questions are absent in Glück’s poetic world, where a faith in the medium of poetry–and of its ability to narrate and describe–prevails. One gets the sense from reading Glück that those questions are far more removed from us than the Mediterranean landscapes of the Odyssey or the garden of Eden or the forest of Hansel and Gretel.

Writing children into her poems, Glück trusted in the authority of stories and of language to examine the truth of despair and the recovery of hope. That is not a popular position to claim in an era in which that kind of trust, and the exhortation to look deep within culture as well as history, has all but disappeared. But it is one reason why her work deserves to be celebrated, and why it will endure.