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The Garden [from The Garden] (audio only)

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Louise Glück
1943 –
2023

Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.

From Descending Figure, published by The Ecco Press, 1980.

Louise Glück
Photo credit: Gasper Tringale

The author of numerous collections of poetry, Louise Glück is the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, served as a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, and twas the Library of Congress’s poet laureate consultant in poetry.

About Louise Glück

Themes
Audio
Body
Nature

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More by this poet

The Red Poppy

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.

Louise Glück
1992

The Myth of Innocence

One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was.
Louise Glück
2006

Liberation (audio only)

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Louise Glück
1985

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