Louise Glück (1943–2023)

Louise Glück was born in New York. She published her first book of poems at twenty-five. She spent fifty years writing with great care and great patience. She did not publish often. Each book is deliberate.

Her poems are short and cold and exact. She writes about a garden the way another writer might write about a war. She writes about flowers and seasons and the dead as if they are all in the same room and only she can hear them.

She uses the word you the way a surgeon uses a scalpel: precisely, without warning, and aimed directly at something soft. You do not always know if she is speaking to God or to you or to herself. She does not explain.

She received the Nobel Prize in 2020 and died in 2023. The committee called her voice "unmistakable." They were right.

Her Nobel Lecture was recorded in Berkeley in 2023, three years after the prize and months before her death. It begins with a contest she staged in her head at five or six to find the greatest poem in the world. Read it at NobelPrize.org.