The Wild Iris (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Poet Louise Gluck was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Published in 1992, "The Wild Iris," a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner in 1993, is a collection of 54 poems telling about changes in a garden, written in the voices of individual flowers.
— From Gifting Books - Holiday 2020
I was always afraid of poetry until I read this incredible collection. Gluck's language and storytelling are at once lush, deep, and accessible to any kind of reader.
Gluck uses nature to weave together the thoughts—and at times the angry, confused rantings—of creator and creation. At any given time you're reading the intimate experiences of flowers in a garden, a gardener, and/or the creator of the gardener. Whenever I go back and read this collection, I feel like I'm listening to some ancient and familiar conversation about the meaning of our existence here.
-Brittni
— From BrittniWinner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms
Bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.
"Louise Gluck is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional' nor 'intellectual' in the usual senses of those words, which are often thought to represent two camps in the life of poetry. . . . What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siecle, written in the language of flowers. It Is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form." — Helen Vendler, The New Republic
"Gluck is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems. . . have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional' nor 'intellectual' in the usual senses of those words, which are often thought to represent two camps in the life of poetry. . . . What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siecle, written in the language of flowers. . . . It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection." — The New Republic
"There are a few living poets whose new poems one always feels eager to read. Louise Gluck ranks at the top of the list. Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain." — David Biespiel, Washington Post