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Title: Winter Recipes from the Collective
Author: Louise Glück
First published: 2021
Dates read: 26. – 27. 08. 2023
Category: first time read, library book, poetry, 20 Books of Summer 2023
Rating: 3.5/5
The book in five words or less: beautiful lines, beautiful imagery

My thoughts:

When I read Winter Recipes from the Collective as one of my last 20 Books of Summer books, I thought I could write a review of it about as quickly as I read the collection. Turns out, that is not the case. Not because I didn’t enjoy reading Winter Recipes, just because I’ve found that I don’t have much to say about it. I generally enjoy reading poetry – I go through phases, and as stated in my review of Lyrical Ballads, I do have a pretty good idea of what I like – but I find it a difficult literary form to review.

What I can say is that Louise Glück is very skilled at wrapping up minute observations in neat and beautiful language, and that the collection did make me mull over the poems more than Lyrical Ballads did, and with much less annoyance when trying to figure out what the author was trying to do. However, Winter Recipes is also a very short collection. Its main themes are grief, ageing, and the dying of the year (and of people), with some beautiful observations of nature thrown in, which generally are topics I enjoy musing about through the medium of poetry. That said, I don’t think any of Glück’s observations are particularly deep or unexpected (except in how some of them are phrased), and I am not sure how much staying power the collection will have in the long run. I would still recommend picking up the collection if Glück writes the kind of poetry you like. As for myself, well – I have noted down some of the passages and phrases that I liked in the hopes that, perhaps, that might help with not forgetting everything immediately.

Favourite poems: Autumn, An Endless Story, A Sentence

Read if you like: Mary Oliver, meditative poetry, Japanese landscape painting, minute observations