The Wild Iris

The Wild Iris is a 1992 poetry book by Louise Glück, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.[1] The book also received the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award.[2]

The Wild Iris
First edition
AuthorLouise Gluck
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenrePoetry
Published1992
Pages63
ISBN978-0880013345

Most of the poems in The Wild Iris are written in the voice of flowers: vespers, wildflowers, snowdrops, etc,. Some are written in the voice of a Deity. While others have a human speaker. The poems wrestle with life and death, reincarnation, despair, solitude, fear of death, fear of living, fear of the deity/deities--the landscape most focused on being the advent of spring, after the long nights of winter are ended.

The voice of the characters is stack, precise, commanding. The issue of being a living thing (in the shadow and light of a deity that refuses to reveal herself) interrogated with little flourish or circumventing. At times, the flowers mock the human speaker (or the "you," possibly the reader); at other times, empathizing with the human speaker or human condition/dilemma. There is little "confession" in the poems, although certain characters do appear, letting us into the world of the human speaker. But the little given here is attached to a suffering far greater in scope than the domestic problems imitated in some of the poems.

References
  1. "Poetry Category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 17 February 2016.
  2. Haralson, Eric L. (2014-01-21). Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. Routledge. p. 252. ISBN 978-1-317-76322-2.


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