Glück, Louise - Stephen Yenser (essay date 1994)
Stephen Yenser (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Wild Plots," in Partisan Review, Vol. LXI, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 350-55.
[Yenser is American poet, educator, and critic. Here, he acknowledges that the fifty-four poems in The Wild Iris generate a complete sequence; nevertheless, he asserts that the use of many voices is a problematic aspect of her work in the volume.]
Louise Glück's The Wild Iris characteristically contains no poem longer than thirty lines, and many of the poems gleam with the knifing ironies and the burnished paradoxes that have always marked her work, while some show a new visionary fire; but there is a strong sense in which this, her sixth volume, is really a single, rhizomic sequence, a complex structure that we can now see has been evolving at least since her third volume, Descending Figure, and which is embodied, in a less integrated form, in her fifth, Ararat. Glück wrote these fifty-four...
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