Poem for a Tuesday — “All Hallows” by Louise Gluck

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

_{in Louise Gluck. The First Four Books of Poems. (New York: Harper Collins, 1995).}

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Poet and essayist Louise Gluck was born in New York City in 1943. She suffered from anorexia nervosa as a girl and her early work lyrically reflected the struggle to live with trauma, failed love, family dysfunction, and despair. She graduated from Columbia University and supported herself as a secretary until the publication of her critically acclaimed first collection of poems Firstborn. She went on to publish eleven more works of poetry and three collections of essays. Gluck taught at Goddard College, Williams College, and served as the Rosencrantz Writer in Residence at Yale University. In 2003, she was named the twelfth US Poet Laureate. In 2020, she became the first American woman poet to win the Nobel Literature Prize for her overall contribution to literature. Louise Gluck died earlier this month at her home in Cambridge at the age of eighty.

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