PARIS, Oct 8 — The American poet Louise Gluck won the Nobel Prize for Literature today, only the 16th women to have ever done so.
Here are some of her most famous and more memorable lines and verses:
“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory”
-- from Nostos
“Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.”
-- from American Originality: Essays on Poetry
“I have very little taste for public life... I didn’t think I was the sort of person they’d ever look at”
-- to The Boston Globe when she was named US Poet Laureate in 2003.
“Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer”
-- from Descending Figure
“The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams”
-- from It Is Daylight
“As I saw it,/ all my mother’s life, my father/ held her down, like/ lead strapped to her ankles.
She was/ buoyant by nature;/ she wanted to travel,/ go to the theater, go to museums./ What he wanted/ was to lie on the couch/ with the Times/ over his face,/ so that death, when it came,/ wouldn’t seem a significant change.”
-- from Ararat
“The unsaid, for me, exerts great power...”
-- from Proofs and Theories
“We respect, here in America / what is concrete, visible. We ask/ What is it for?”
-- from The Seven Ages
“I got up finally; I walked down to the pond./ I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,/ like a girl after her first lover”
-- from Marathon
— AFP
