Remembering Louise Glück (1943-2023)

We had heard that she was ill, but it was still a shock on Friday when messages started coming in from friends that the poet Louise Glück had died. Everybody dies, and Glück was eighty, with a life behind her of extraordinary accomplishment and extraordinary recognition; so why did it feel so unjust? Maybe because her illness, at least in my awareness of it, was recent and swift; and maybe because she was still working at the height of her powers, one of the rare poets whose late work had deepened, grown richer and stranger. I remember hearing her read at Bread Loaf in 2008 and thinking that the poems had become just enormous—not in their length, though that had grown too, but in their reach, in the leaps they could make, in what they could contain. That feeling intensified with each subsequent collection. She had more great poems to write.