I thought I liked Louise Glück, but that was in high school, and things evidently change. Couldn't connect with the majority of these, not because they're not good, but because they didn't seem to say anything new or interesting. And I expect poetry to deliver some kind of intellectual static jolt beyond the poet's facility with language. This collection is thematically cohesive, and the language is elegant in its deceptive simplicity, but its soul—is spite of Glück's overfondness for the word—felt lacking.

2.5

the daughter's body
doesn't exist, except
as a branch of the mother's body
that needs to be
reattached at any cost

A journey of all seasons.........

Nature, it turns out, isn't like us
it doesn't have a warehouse of memory.
The field doesn't become afraid of matches,
of young girls. It doesn't remember
furrows either. It gets killed off, it gets burned,
and a year later it's alive again
as though nothing unusual has occurred.

"My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—"

"She has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter."

"My parents couldn't see the life in my head; when I wrote it down, they fixed the spelling"

Glück comparing Persephone’s mother to a bus was definitely the low-point of this collection.

I feel that the more I read poetry, the more I will understand and appreciate poetry. This book has some really good poems, but perhaps many were above my head

Reread before review

favorites: Persephone the Wanderer, A Myth of Devotion, Averno 1, Omens, Telescope