the love of poetry
The “good” thing about falling sick is that I can be stuck at home reading poetry. Specifically, I went through the collected poems of 2020 Nobel laureate Louise Glück. I never registered that she had won the Nobel prize for literature - this poet that I associate with the American tradition of confessional poetry does not stand for a political cause, a traumatic national history, or an under-represented people. The Committee instead cites “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. I guess it was apt in 2020. That year when COVID made everyone aware of our individual existence, that we all die alone, and made solitude necessary for survival. That was the year the world was too ill to fight wars with each other. Glück is “easy” to read. Take her 1990 book Ararat . Each poem is like an episode of a family drama - the writer, her dead sister, her surviving sister and their relationship with their parents, a constant tug between love an