Many years ago, when Louise Glück’s The House on Marshland was fairly new, I had the privilege of teaching it (or musing about it in front of others), along with three or four other full-length books of poems. Instead of cherry-picking poems to illustrate this or that form, technique, style, or voice, we engaged whole books on the level of theme, world-view, the force-fields created by various approaches to metaphor and tone, and yes, worked to understand what the author intended to say.Read More