Firstborn by Louise Gluck

Source of book: I own this

 

This last Christmas was a good one for books, between gifts from others, and what I managed to find used. In this case, I had a gift card from Barnes and Noble to spend, and got the complete (so far) Louise Gluck. 

 

My experience of Gluck was pretty limited - just a poem here and there - but I liked what I had seen enough to add her to my collection. Her poetry feels very much in the style of the second half of the 2th Century: quirky, oblique, and often unexpected. This is not a criticism at all. One might say that she embodies what is best of the era. 

 

Gluck is having a bit of a moment these days, at least by the standards of poetry, since winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. She also has served as poet laureate, and won a Pulitzer and other prizes. The book I purchased covers 50 years of writing, which is impressive any way you look at it. Firstborn is, as indicated, her first collection, published in 1968.  

 

Gluck’s poems tend to be a bit dark and brooding. I was, in a way, reminded of Thomas Hardy, although their styles are quite different. Trauma is one of her recurring themes, and many of the poems seem to have been set in the aftermath of some sort of emotional catastrophe. At the same time, Gluck shows a strong attachment to nature, particularly that of the Eastern Seaboard. I am not sure how representative Firstborn is, although my understanding is that it isn’t as highly regarded as her mature works. In any case, I have plenty more of her poetry to read in the future. 

 

Here are the poems that I liked best. 

 

First is a cycle of three poems, entitled “Egg.” Having read it through several times, I am not confident that I understand everything she is trying to say, but with poetry, sometimes it is enough - or even best - to grasp it by feel. Here is the third poem, my favorite. 

 

III

 

Always nights I feel the ocean

Biting at my life. By

Inlet, in this net

Of bays, and on. Unsafe.

And on, numb

In the bourbon ripples of your breath

I knot . . . 

Across the beach the fish

Are coming in. Without skins,

Without fins, the bare

Households of their skulls

Still fixed, piling

With the other waste.

Husks, husks. Moons

Whistle in their mouths,

Through gasping mussels.

Pried flesh. And flies

Like planets, clamped shells

Clink blindly through

Veronicas of waves . . . 

The thing

Is hatching. Look. The bones

Are bending to give way.

It’s dark. It’s dark.,

He’s brought a bowl to catch

The pieces of the baby. 

 

That’s not exactly the most idyllic nature description, to say the least. But find it creates an impression that is as “true” as the more peaceful one. I am intrigued by the Veronica reference. The legend of the saint is that she wiped the face of Christ during his procession to the cross, and his face imprinted on her cloth. So one wonders precisely how Gluck imagines the waves to wipe - and retain the impression. I’ll have to think that one over a bit. 

 

Several of the poems describe failed or failing relationships. It is difficult to know exactly how autobiographical they are. Gluck struggled with anorexia and mental health in general during her college years, and was partway through a short and disastrous marriage when she published Firstborn. I have a hard time imagining she could write these poems without some traumatic relationship experience. This one is brilliant, but really tough to read. 

 

The Edge

 

Time and again, time and again I tie

My heart to that headboard

While my quilted cries

Harden against his hand. He’s bored -

I see it. Don’t I lick his bribes, set his bouquets

In water? Over Mother’s lace I watch him drive into the gored

Roasts, deal slivers in his mercy … I can feel his thighs

Against me for the children’s sakes. Reward?

Mornings, crippled with this house, 

I see him toast his toast and test

His coffee, hedging. The waste’s my breakfast.

 

I love how she turns sexuality on its head. Every word picture feels like it is about sex, but also maybe isn’t about sex. He’s bored, and she is frustrated - that much is clear. But how and why? With everything serving as a metaphor for her relationship - or is it that she sees the relationship in every detail of life? - everything is interconnected and inseparable. 

 

Also interesting is that this poem looks at first glance like free verse, in part because the line lengths do not fit a pattern. But it definitely has a rhyme scheme. ABABCBCBDEE as I scan it. That B rhyme - board, bored, gored, reward - is already viscerally disturbing even out of context. The A and C rhymes are very approximate, and the E rhyme is almost but not quite. And then, “house” stands out as the only ending which doesn’t rhyme with anything else. Indeed, it feels out of place with every other word in the poem: it has a unique vowel sound that doesn’t show up anywhere else. 

 

There are layers to this one, which is why it stood out to me. 

 

Another poem with a form caught my eye. It feels very formal compared to most of the other poems in the collection. Again, though, her choice of words to rhyme is unusual to say the least. Take a look:

 

The Lady in the Single

 

Cloistered as the snail and conch

In Edgartown where the Atlantic

Rises to deposit junk

On plush, extensive sand and the pedantic.

 

Meet for tea, amid brouhaha

I have managed this peripheral still,

Wading just steps below

The piles of overkill:

 

Jellyfish. But I have seen

The slick return of one that oozed back

On a breaker. Marketable sheen.

The stuffed hotel. A shy, myopic

 

Sailor loved me once, near here.

The summer house we’d taken for July

Was white that year, bare

Shingle; he could barely see

 

To kiss, still tried to play

Croquet with the family - like a girl almost,

With loosed hair on her bouquet

Of compensating flowers. I thought I was past

 

The memory. And yet his ghost

Took shape in smoke above the pan roast.

Five years. In tenebris the catapulted heart drones

Like Andromeda. No one telephones. 

 

There is a lot of approximate rhyme, and a few that really require a squint. And then the shift to AABB in the last stanza is interesting. And, who else would compare that sort of a failed relationship to dead jellyfish washed up on the shore? 

 

This next one is another that is so unexpected, it shocks every time I read it. I am a cave lover - and a bat lover - so the references are plenty understandable - but where she goes with it…

 

Memo From the Cave

 

O love, you airtight bird,

My mouse-brown

Alibis hang upside-down

Above the pegboard

With its dangled pots

I don’t have chicken for;

My lies are crawling on the floor

Like families but their larvae will not

Leave this nest. I’ve let

Despair bed

Down in your stead

And wet

Our quilted cover

So the rot-

scent of its pussy-foot-

ing fingers lingers, when it’s over.

 

That muddying of the very concept of line and word at the end - breaking words over the line - is an interesting technique, and makes it fun to read out loud. How to read it is really the question - as one long line for the last three…or hesitating a bit over it? 

 

For the most part, the poems feel more personal than political. But there is one definite exception. It seems fitting for our time. 

 

Saturnalia

 

The year turns. The wolf takes back her tit

As war eats at the empire

Past this waxworks, the eternal city.

We have had our round. What 

Lords rise are not of Rome: now northward some two-bit

Vercingetorix sharpens his will. A star

Is born.                    Caesar

Snores on his perch above the Senate.

 

This is history. Ice clogs the ducts; my friend

I wake to frost

On marble and a chill men take for omen

Here. The myth contracts. All cast

For comfort, shunt their works to pray,

Preening for Judgment. Judgment fails. One year, 

Twenty -- we are lost. This month the feasts begin.

Token slaves suck those dripping fowl we offer 

To ensure prosperity.

 

It does help to know a bit of history and mythology for poems like this, of course. Or at least be able to look it up. But the commentary on empire is timeless - and for all empires. 

 

I want to quote another nature poem, one that feels less connected to a specific relationship, and more of a mood. I feel like the ending sounds of the lines are a progression where some element of each new line is linked to the last one. Maybe I am seeing (hearing?) things, but that is my experience of this poem. 

 

Meridian

 

Long Island Sound’s

Asleep: no wind

Rustles down the inlet

In the sagging light

As, stalled at 

Vanishing, two Sunday sailboats

Wait it out,

Paralysis, or peace,

Whichever, and the drained sun

Sinks through insects coalesced

To mist, mosquitoes

Rippling over the muddy ocean. 

 

The final poem I want to look at is my favorite from this collection. It share some images with “Egg” and a setting with several other poems about the shore. But it is a brilliant distilled moment, with the sort of shift to the inward at the end that reminds me of the best of Emily Dickinson. 

 

Cottonmouth Country

 

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.

And there were other signs

That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us

By land: among the pines

An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss

Reared in the polluted air.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

I know. I also left a skin there.

 

I’m not sure what else I can say, other than that I found that to be a singularly breathtaking poem. Eight short lines, a simple form, a fairly traditional structure. But what worlds are contained in it. 

 

I think I will be enjoying Gluck in the years to come. I am getting a pretty decent poetry collection in my library, and am the richer for making sure I am constantly reading from it. There is so much that has to be read between the lines - “slant” as Dickinson describes it. Gluck, even before she came into her own, already showed this ability and a mature ear for language.