SOURCE: Finch, Annie. “Unrelinquished Burdens.” North American Review 279, no. 4 (July–August 1994): 40–42.

In the following excerpt, Finch discusses the thematically unified poems in The Wild Iris and the spiritual emphasis of the poems.

Louise Glück's Pulitzer-prize winning collection of poems, The Wild Iris, focuses on the burden of religious pain. The book consists of an ongoing dialogue, a dialogue that is rarely easy, between a god and a human being. Glück lets the poems' titles indicate who is speaking, and the essential incompatibility between the two participants in the book's uncomfortable conversation is suggested at the start by the fact that god speaks only as various aspects of nature: “Red Poppy,” “Violets,” “Retreating Wind,” while the speaker addresses god only through the medieval Christian forms of “Matins” and “Vespers.” The speaker's modes of address, like the notions of a distant, removed and uncaring god that permeate this...