Wild, cold winds are buffeting the garden today in one of spring’s temperamental fits of pique.  It’s a good day to sit down with a book and enjoy some flower verse – after all, we just had Poetry Month.  The Wild Iris (1992) by Louise Glück (1943-2023) is an extraordinary collection.  Of all the many countless poems written on the subject of flowers and springtime, how many have you read that are written from a plant’s point of view? 

This is exactly what Glück achieves here, in an elegantly interrelated cycle of poems.  As the late critic Helen Vendler wrote in a review, “What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siecle, written in the language of flowers.”

Glück imagines the Scilla chastising itself: “you idiot”.  Daisies contemplate the world of machines.  And the red poppy is “governed” by its feelings. 

The trillium:

                                                                                    “woke up ignorant in a forest/

                                                                                    …I could do nothing but see.”

Not only flowers but our weedy friends (foes?) are given voice, such as the Lamium and Witchgrass, which says, defiantly:

                                                                                    “I was here first”

Then the human gardener gets to speak:

                                                                                    “You want to know how I spend my time?

                                                                                    I walk the front lawn, pretending

                                                                                    to be weeding.”

Here you’ll also find poems titled “Retreating Wind,” “Spring Snow,” “April,” “End of Winter.”  Who says that poetry isn’t relatable, or relevant to our daily gardening realities? 

In 2020, Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”   For The Wild Iris, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. 

 

Photo of Glück by Gerard Malanga (Wikipedia Commons).