Winter Recipes for Spring

On Ledbury Poetry Critics and Louise Glück

One year ago, the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme announced its latest cohort. Founded in 2017 by Sandeep Parmar and Sarah Howe to support new critics of colour, Ledbury has been an important force for change in UK poetry reviewing culture. As Parmar has observed, ‘just 8 articles by non-white critics were published in 2009; there were 75 in 2019’.

It’s been an honour to be involved in the programme as a mentor — and so a delight to see, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s review of Louise Glück.

Oluwaseun’s longstanding admiration, as a poet, for Glück’s work was evident from our first conversation last April. But as mentor, I began to worry that perhaps I had encouraged something too daunting — or too close to the heart — when the chance arose to review both Glück’s Collected Poems and Winter Recipes from the Collective, her first volume since winning the Nobel Prize.

So it’s with pride this week that I offer the following paragraph from a piece that brings acute and original insight, precisely expressed, to every stage of Glück’s career:

Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021), her most recent collection, contains fifteen poems. Her smallest book to date, it nevertheless accrues power in typical Glück fashion: through polyphonic progression, metaphysical contradiction and intimate addresses to an imagined “you”. The half-dream, half-memory sequences in this collection diverge from her previous work in the way they render the ecstasy of youth and the experience of age as strangely close yet temporally distant. Speakers struggle with their memories rather than authoritatively recounting them: “I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so / whose name I couldn’t remember”. Glück has always been a master of emotional abstraction. In this book, where a central subject is arguably the vitality of the mind, she involves the reader in the psychological dances of her speakers through the juxtaposition of motion and inertness: “I could hear the clock ticking, / presumably alluding to the passage of time / while in fact annulling it”.