Wild Iris

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020! The poems in this collection are written in the language of flowers. Louise Gluck received the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993, and has also received the National Book Critics Award for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award. Helen Vendler wrote in The New Republic: 'Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither "confessional" nor "intellectual" in the usual senses of those words, which are often thought to represent two camps in the life of poetry.' What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siècle, written in the language of flowers. It is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form. It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection.