Noche fiel y virtuosa

After the publication of her collected poetry in 2012, the poet Louise Glück in Night faithful and virtuous has followed the advice of her colleague Richard Siken to "play in the mud, only play in the mud". In what is his last book published before the award of the Nobel Prize in 2020, Glück abandons the mythological masks of his previous work to look from old age directly to the horizon of death -his own, that of loved ones- in a series of poems (including prose poems for the first time) in which a female lyrical subject, more or less identifiable with the poet, alternates with the voice of a male alter ego: a painter who addresses silence and the canvas in target of the final stretch of his life. Childhood and old age, night and day, past and future, reality and fiction, the whiteness of the snow and the darkness of the gardens, King Arthur and psychoanalysis come together in a circularity of travel, walks and books where the subject displays, with a dreamlike tone -"medieval dream visions", one critic called them- his acceptance of death, resigned, daring and curious at the same time.