Faithful and Virtuous Night
- Mar 23, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
★★★★☆
I was vaguely familiar with Louise Glück before her death was reported by The New York Times in October 2023. She seemed like someone who I should, if not love, at least get familiar with. So, in a binge move, I picked up five books of poetry from the library, including Faithful and Virtuous Night, the sole non-anthology volume in their collection. As with Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things, this may not have been the ideal place to start with Glück’s work. After all, she’s published 14 books of poetry since 1968, and this one was the next to last published in her lifetime. I’m guessing her work has traveled a fair distance in the 45 or so years between her first book and this one.
Faithful and Virtuous Night, though no doubt a book of poetry as evidenced by the formatting of its verse, reads more like a collection of short stories. In fact, six of its 24 poems are prose poems. I think those could have just as easily been formatted to verse and the other 18 to prose. The works convey themselves as dreamlike, otherworldly visions, enigmas and parables to be pondered over, their truths hidden in plain sight, waiting to be unlocked not by the mind but by the heart. They also come from a place that feels very foreign to me, precisely the kind of poetry I don’t think I could write—a very different feeling from how I feel when I read Limón.
More widely read readers might have more apt comparisons, but here I was reminded again and again of Kafka and Kawabata, authors who, respectively, meant a lot to me during my college years and in the decade that followed. And, I might add, authors who have little in common with each other: one claustrophobic, paranoid, nervy; the other minimalist, classical, restrained. (Whether Glück does elsewhere in her vast body of work I can’t say, but she does so to intriguing effect here.) I would do well to revisit them both, to see if they still hold up for me all these years later or if they were simply in the right place at the right time. I would also do well to revisit Faithful and Virtuous Night, to see if my heart holds the key to unlocking its secrets or if these enchanting and evocative poems ultimately elude me like trying to recall a dream upon waking.
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