I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Louise Glück. She is, perhaps, best known for her poetry collection The Wild Iris, which was published in 1992 and for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem opens the book: At the end of my suffering / there was a door.

Her 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, also from Carcanet, gave me both comfort and confidence as I was struggling to complete the manuscript of Remembering / Disease. ‘You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently.’ Each time I entered this world, I felt closer to home.

Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her ‘unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’.

The title poem Faithful and Virtuous Night is a long poem, over 10 pages, consisting of short stanzas. It ends:

I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or, perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings.