Often in Asian scroll paintings, immense landscapes fill the canvases while human presence is minimized, maybe through a sole wanderer shouldering his or her burden up or down a mountain path, or possibly a fisherman catching what may or may not be caught from the unheeding roils of a river. At other times village life is included and when doing so the perspective is typically from above to allow a bird’s eye view of the daily activities being depicted. One can look down and peer into the drama of village life, but a much grander view awaits a more expansive eye. And its the play in these perspectives that is required to see the light in Louise Glück’s 2009 collection, A Village Life.

Glück is often cited as being our modern poetess of doom and gloom, where transient life is brief and existence stark, momentary while in an unforgiving reality that forces us into solitude while moving closer and closer to eventual death. And in A Village Life, this is in full display as she versifies the end of childhood innocence, the emotional turbulence that can accompany romance, marital breakdown, alcohol infused escapism, withering bodies, the grim reaper that burns the landscape ash-barren every autumn– a frank denial of hope. And this is all very true....

...but there is more than this, much more. Behind Glück’s imaginary village are the mountains of immense existence, infinite meadows, illuminating sunlight that sets and rises both in and out of her poetic scenes, and, of course, small hints of summer. There remains in her book a returning of the perspective away from the urban and back to the continuance of the pastoral, to lift one’s gaze from her encapsulated village to also bear witness to the grander, more peaceful, reality of existence.

Then, a step further. Yes there is the continual cycle of the natural world. With death is birth and with bith comes more depth, ad nauseum. But the life of the individual body is not cyclic, it is finite. As much as we can enjoy the site of kids playing in the upsurge of a city fountain, lifeless cold gravity continues to pull us down into the black of earth. So where can consolation be found? Partly from stoic acceptance, but in reoccurring tropes of light (distant sun, personal candles) and window sitting (appreciative framing of our view outside from a detached perspective inside), Glück provides poetic gestures of apophatic theology which rely upon negation in order to understand the divine that courses equally through both our microcosm and the macrocosm. Not always bridging the two, but capable of demonstrating unity.

Its an experimental approach to higher understanding Glück’s poetry can lead a reader towards. And at least for this reader, she’s capable of creating such an experience. Her emotional insights are penetrating, cruelly so. But if you find yourself in a darker stage of your life, such cruelty befriends, like shadows colluding into the chiaroscuro of day and night. These things do happen and no one represents them better than Glück. And what she provides is not fanciful optimism, but appreciation to understand that what we do have will always be enough.