Dead Poets Live - Louise Glück: Meadowlands / Vita Nova

When Louise Glück died in October 2023, aged 80, she left behind her thirteen volumes of poetry, stretching from 2021 back to 1968 – a remarkably various sequence, crowned in 2020 with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At its midpoint are two collections, Meadowlands (1996) and Vita Nova (1999), published consecutively, whose subject is the end of a marriage. The poems of Meadowlands speak from within that experience, faithful to its confusion. They speak in many voices: long-suffering, impatient, reconciled, unreasonable, tender, petty, humorous, desperate, angry, mournful, desolate. Vita Nova is written in the aftermath, reflecting from a greater distance, and facing forward as well as back. In both volumes we encounter daily bickering, minutely notated as passionate aria; household pets recast as household gods; the whole prose of married life whittled into lines as spare and essential as Greek myth. Together these volumes form a kind of diptych, as attentive to the surface and the soul as any of the great marriage studies of their era – hilariously, painfully accurate.

Dead Poets Live are delighted to be returning to Wilton’s this autumn to present these two collections together, and to give the miraculous and distinctive voice of these poems the appreciation it deserves.

Photo credit: Katherine Wolkoff