"You Go Where You Are Sent": Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris

This week, I'm reading Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris. I'm a little late to this poetry party: the book was first published in 1993 and received that year's Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and people have been recommending Gluck's volume to me for years.

But late is certainly better than never! So far, The Wild Iris is one of those rare collections where every poem is breathtaking. The collection as a whole is tightly woven; each poem is either a) told from the point of view of a flower (or sometimes a patch of clover or bit of seasonal weather), or b) told in the voice of a human speaker as she roams the garden around her house (these poems are all titled "Matins"). Thematically, the poems are preoccupied with God, human happiness, and the inability to accept death as a part of nature. The flower poems, especially, speak to the all-too-human flaws (the desires for immortality, independence, spiritual connection, etc.) that cause the human speaker's unhappiness.

I can't say enough good things about this book, so I'll hold off on further lauding until I've finished it. In the meantime, here's "Scilla," one of my favorites from the collection. I love how sharp the flowers' voice is in this one ("Not I, you idiot"), and the flowers' message ("to be one thing / is to be next to nothing") is so fresh and surprising to me. Gluck does a fantastic job in this book of imagining herself into the shoes (or perhaps into the roots?) of these flowers so that her dramatic monologues, though fanciful in theory, always come off as startlingly, achingly true.

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Scilla

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we--waves

of sky blue like

a critique of heaven: why

do you treasure your voice

when to be one thing

is to be next to nothing?

Why do you look up? To hear

an echo like the voice

of god? You are all the same to us,

solitary, standing above us, planning

your silly lives: you go

where you are sent, like all things,

where the wind plants you,

one or another of you forever

looking down and seeing some image

of water, and hearing what? Waves

and over waves, birds singing.