Louise Gluck – turning trauma and pain into art

Louise Gluck, the American poet, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature to add to her Pulitzer, various other awards and her former Poet Laureate status. Regarded as one of the pre-eminent poets of the age, her poems rooted in myth and nature, are “dreamlike, chilly, enigmatic”, “relying on mood, suggestion and atmosphere and scene setting, which settings are usually dark”. In her first collection — “Firstborn” – there is a tortured array of thwart