#259.  WHEN WE LEFT IT WAS STILL LIGHT.  In 2021, Louise Glück published Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), a spare and accomplished collection of some forty pages; she died in 2023.  The title reminded me immediately of Winter Words, Thomas Hardy’s last book of poems.  Winter was Glück’s natural season: isolation and trauma were her recurrent themes, her language terse and dense and certainly not overpopulated with the flowers of Spring, tra la.  Autumn creeps in: “Stars gleaming over the water. / The leaves piled, waiting to be lit.”  She is prone to keeping a sharp eye on any kind of joy, certain it will wink out with a moment’s passing.  Of even her childhood and her mother’s love, she writes, “All too soon I emerged / my true self, / robust but sour, / like an alarm clock.”  But winter is not only the season of freezing cold; it can be the time of hush, of quiet, of introspection and unluxuriant words.  This is Glück’s timbre here, and I’ve found the book to have a stubborn hold on my thoughts now, weeks after I’ve finished reading it.  Winter Recipes does not refute the darkness or the pain of her previous work, but suggests she found at last a space, a way to live within it. 

So when we left it was still light 

and everything could be seen for what it was,

and then you got in the car—

Where did you go next, after those days,

when although you could not speak you were not lost?