Louise Gluck Overview

Gluck is a poet whose willingness to confront the horrible, the difficult, and the painful has resulted in a body of work characterized by insight and a severe lyricism. Though sometimes cliched, her work is moving and thought-provoking. She was the... [more]

Gluck is a poet whose willingness to confront the horrible, the difficult, and the painful has resulted in a body of work characterized by insight and a severe lyricism. Though sometimes cliched, her work is moving and thought-provoking. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003-2004. In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: "Louise Glück 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." She has also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her honors include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999 Glück was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. In the fall of 2003, she replaced Billy Collins as the Library of Congress's twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. In 2003, she was announced as the new judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she will hold through 2007. She is a writer-in-residence at Yale University. [show less]