Just like she wrote in A Children’s Story that ‘calm is not the truth’, the poem collection is full of poems with a ‘frankness I had nearly forgotten’ (A Memory). Such frankness is valuable, because ‘in spring, anyone can make a fine meal’, while in winter, life is hard. Ending with ‘the fire is still alive’, Louise Glück left a glimpse of hope for the reader despite the poems themselves being serious contemplations (that can sometimes be a bit pessimistic )
on the nature of life, hope and truth. And of course death. The collection took a dramatic beginning and seemed to intend to deny death, but in later poems the poet seemed to accept death and aging, viewing it as a tale or fable, a finished sentence, while life is an unfinished one, and the moral lesson waiting to be taught was hidden from our naked eyes.
But reconciliation with death is nothing like surrender to death. The first few poems caution us that we should not deceive ourselves into living in an illusion. Yet at the end the poet was glad that she could ‘dream’, and that the fire is still alive when one learns to live in imagination.
The only thing is I don’t see the reason why there is a thread of Asian culture throughout the book (probably because I bought and read this book without any prior knowledge of the life and work of poet). As an Asian myself I find it a bit hard to discern what she was referring to.