The weather in NYC has been absolutely glorious this week, but it is still winter, dear reader. As such, I am squirreled up by the fireplace in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel (it’s Thursday night at time of writing). Additionally, I am making good on my New Year’s Resolution to read more poetry with a book of poems by Louise Glück, that is (serendipitously) seasonally appropriate. That book is Winter Recipes from the Collective, and it’s a winter vibe FOR SURE.
I will start at the beginning, with one of my favorite poems, “Poem,” partly because it’s the first in the collection, so it makes sense, but also because I think it encapsulates many of the themes that stood out to me throughout. I’m sure that wasn’t an accident on Louise’s part. I’m going to call her by her first name, which might be unprofessional because we don’t know each other that well yet, but the umlaut is too much for me.
“Poem,” is a meditation on the collective, grounded in the specific. To create this sense, she uses fairytale imagery and language while also referencing herself and an unnamed companion. In this case, our fairy tale figures are a “boy and girl” representing “Day and night.” They “eat wild berries out of a dish / painted with pictures of birds,” and they climb a mountain and fly away. The speaker wants to be able to do the same with her companion, but knows that, despite her prayers, it is not possible. Instead they fall “downward and downward and downward and downward.” Through this imagery, the topic of death, not just inevitable, but actually impending, is introduced. The speaker struggles to find comfort and all seems lost. But then, at the end, in the midst of the falling, “the world goes by, / all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last; / I touch your cheek and protect you—” With this, Louise introduces two sources of hope: the cyclical nature of existence, and the comfort of companionship.
These dual sources of hope glimmer gently throughout the frequent darkness of Winter Recipes. I was particularly drawn to the parts that highlight companionship - the poems that feature one other person with whom she is in deep conversation - or sometimes companionable silence. Including these figures also allows for a use of a specific “we” that encapsulates the wider, collective “we.” The preoccupation with death, first introduced in “Poem” also hovers over the whole collection. A particular focus is the death of Louise’s sister, who is mentioned explicitly in four poems, and implicitly many more times than that. This ties back into the individual vs. collective theme - Louise may be thinking about her sister’s death, but any singular death is a collective death as well. As she says in the titular poem, “Winter Recipes from the Collective,” — “there is no such thing as death in miniature.”
Another repeated pattern is a sudden switching, between present day and childhood recollections. This happens primarily in the poems about her sister’s imminent death. It makes sense that these childhood reflections would arise as she considers the death of her childhood companion, and it’s really beautifully done. “Second Wind,” has my favorite instance of this temporal convergence. It begins, “I think this is my second wind, / my sister said,” which sets the poem in present day - her very ill sister is feeling positive in this particular moment. Then the image of a powerful wind takes control of the poem, and suddenly we get these lines that transport the reader back to a time of childhood:
…Remember
running around the park in Cedarhurst
jumping on the piles, destroying them?
You never jumped, my mother said.
You were good girls; you stayed where I put you.
Not in our heads,
my sister said…”
Aside from these, another favorite was “The Denial of Death,” which was a fairytale, mystery, parable poem. It is also the first of Louise’s longer narrative poems, of which there are four (including the titular poem). In “The Denial of Death,” a traveler loses her passport and becomes stuck at “a beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea.” Her traveling companion moves on without her. The hotel is a representation of the state of grief, and the speaker is stuck, at times, willingly. It’s a beautiful poem, populated by the speaker and the concierge (a new companion) who plays the role of philosopher. This poem and the others like it with long story arcs and central characters imparting wisdom contribute to the feeling of universality that Louise so effectively captures. The collective comes back into view, as the characters in each poem impart seemingly age-old nuggets of truth.
Ultimately, parts of this collection are quite dark. Louise does not sugar coat, and she does not wrap her poems up in a pretty bow. I pride myself on being both a realist and an optimist, which makes pessimism in any form hard to stomach for me. And some of Louise’s poetry has a distinctly pessimistic slant. It’s possible that the optimism and hope I was able to uncover here and there was, in some cases, imagined by me - sheer force of will. Either way, I found this collection to be satisfying because it made me feel like no matter how hard she tried to have a dark, dead, winter outlook, she couldn’t stop the hope from poking through.
She explores that notion especially in the last couple poems - death (or decay or whatever else) may not even be the end, but may, in fact, be a part of the renewal process. In “A Memory,” the speaker walks along a river that she seems to remember from childhood, but there was no river in her childhood. She muses that “perhaps / I was going back to that time / before my childhood, to oblivion, maybe / it was that river I remembered.” While the word oblivion suggests nothingness, her theory that she is remembering oblivion suggests that there is in fact substance (rememberable substance) to the oblivion that comes after death and before life. Those oblivions might even be the same oblivion. There’s nothing more hopeful than the idea that the end might actually be the beginning.
Finally, I will leave you with this poem, this Winter Recipe, that is timely above all timeliness. Originally published here in the New Yorker, which I’m including because I don’t know what kind of copyright laws these things are subject to, but I want to include the poem in it’s entirety :)
Presidents’ Day
Lots of good-natured sunshine everywhere
making the snow glitter—quite
lifelike, I thought, nice
to see that again; my hands
were almost warm. Some
principle is at work, taking an interest
in human life, but to be safe
I threw some snow over my shoulder,
since I had no salt. And sure enough
the clouds came back. And sure enough
the sky grew dark and menacing,
all as before except
the losses were piling up—
And yet, moments ago
the sun was shining. How joyful my head was,
basking in it, getting to feel it first
while the limbs waited. Like a deserted hive.
Joyful—now there’s a word
we haven’t used in a while.
Until next time <3