The Wild Iris
Gluck's most celebrated collection: a sequence of poems in three voices (the garden flowers speaking of death and resurrection, the gardener, and a God who is alternately indifferent and desperately present). The Wild Iris won the Pulitzer and established Gluck as the most rigorous philosophical lyric poet in American literature. Her bleakness is not nihilism but honesty; her beauty is never consoling.
Every voice in this garden, flower, gardener, and God, speaks in the same austere Glück cadence, which either deepens the design or exposes it as ventriloquism. Read straight through, the conceit turns programmatic: another bloom, another address to the silence. The chill is deliberate, but fifty-some poems of it can leave you admiring the sequence rather than feeling it.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
