Books We Can't Quit: The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck (A Review by Rachel Mennies)

80 pages, $15

When I first read Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, I was not suffering. I sat on my futon several years ago preparing for discussion of the text in my graduate workshop the following week, and I took in the book quietly and then I read it again and again, entirely consumed. I consumed Gluck’s sharp lines, her exacting verbs. (Her prosody will instruct young poets forever on the bold and crucial task of word choice, of the image so precise and correct that this reader dares to call them perfect.) I mourned, and found comfort in her bravery in the face of her own mourning- but when I read Wild Iris the first time, I was not suffering. Instead, I wore Gluck’s suffering like a coat in summer- puzzled by its trapping force, unsure I would ever need the thickness of its pain.

I have since found Gluck, in her moments of precise darkness, most comforting in broad sorrow- maybe there’s something about the fuzzy noise around national tragedy, its haphazard and nonstop reportage, that makes me long for language so exact it could fit on the tip of a needle. In December of this past year, when the Newtown shooting took twenty children from their parents, the book’s eponymous poem unfolded in my brain. Earlier, in September of 2011, I watched on the local Pittsburgh news as the President landed Air Force One at our airport, en route to nearby Somerset to mourn the tenth anniversary of the crash of Flight 93. Then, too, I reached for Wild Iris, and read the same poem:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

I’ve written before about this poem, and about the power of poetry to help us, communally, through trauma. After Newtown, I returned to Gluck not for community, but for her intimacy; through her spare and haunting lines, I sought and found an unexpected comfort. In Wild Iris, Gluck’s precision oftentimes feels like ordination, a sort of taxonomical christening. This act of naming, this stark ordering of the universe brings her speaker, even as she suffers, into noise- back into the great and terrible world.”I didn’t even know I felt grief,” says the speaker in her poem ‘Trillium,’ “until that word came, until I felt / rain streaming from me.” And at the end of ‘Clear Morning’ the sort of morning that brought the President to Pittsburgh, I remember thinking “the speaker asserts ‘I am prepared now to force / clarity upon you.'” In the black buzz of national trauma, the thin televised mourning and overwrought platitudes gesturing blandly toward grief, we need clarity forced upon us in this exact, unsparing way. I need it, brutally, with each inevitable and brutal event.

And now, as one of the few books I’ve grown with, that I’ve truly loved, I still find myself surprised by my attachment to the text- I reach for it again and again, each time unsure why, each time left sure I’d found what I was seeking. I think often of the speaker of ‘Clear Morning,’ as if she addresses me directly, studying me from the text: “I’ve watched you long enough, / I can speak to you any way I like.” The text has named me, included me in its suffering. It can, and does, speak to me as it desires.

I received Gluck’s doorstop-sized Collected Works for the holidays; I have yet to dent its pages. Perhaps I will be ready for more once my hand stops seeking that first slim volume.

Rachel Mennies is the reviews editor at AGNI. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RHINO, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, No Silence in the Fields, was published by Blue Hour Press in the spring of 2012. She currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a lecturer in English at Carnegie Mellon University.