Where is the Grief-Rage? Louise Glück and the Poetics of Absence

The starting place for this paper was my husband’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and my consequent growing awareness of the limited, negative and medicalised language with which Alzheimer’s disease is often written and spoken about. This discourse of ‘dementia’ both breeds and conceals a fear of what is assumed to be creeping unreason, breakdown and eventual dissolution. It is a language that serves, amongst other things, to distance, to keep at bay, the existential subject. By contrast, poetry has a richly expressive capability for working through, or simply sitting with, the existential conundrums posed by Alzheimer’s disease; it has the capacity to be alongside us in our terror and ambivalence, because of its allusive and lyrical telling of transitions and borderlands, twilight zones and crossings-over, without the need to arrive at answers. This paper focuses on four of Louise Glück’s poems from Winter Recipes from the Collective in order to explore how they express and contain a vast sense of loss—of identity, of certitude, of a sense of meaning and purpose, of memory, of loved ones, of life itself—and in so doing accomplish something extraordinarily powerful and ultimately transcendent.