The Summer Garden Photograph, Or a Barthesian Reading of the Mutable Poetics of Louise Glück

Abstract

The article proposes a reading of the poem “A Summer Garden” by contemporary American poet Louise Glück. The poem is from her recent collection, Faithful And Virtuous Night (2014), signalling a radical change of style for the author, with the shift to longer, seemingly more narrative, poems and to prose poems. Our intention here is to read “A Summer Garden”, a poem of mourning, with the help of Roland Barthes, who discovered in “the Photograph of the Winter Garden” the truth about his mother, who had died three years before the publication of La Chambre claire in 1980. Louise Glück’s “A Summer Garden” starts with the discovery of a photograph of the mother of the poem’s persona. The mother is sitting in a summer garden where time seems to have stopped, to be caught in a temporal interstice and in the insistent repetition of a summer which never seems never to come. We shall examine how Glück’s poetics decentres and defers the punctum of her summer garden photograph, by convening a constellation of deictics, of signs pointing outwards, to what is beyond the frame. While the pages turn black in Glück’s writing, the multiple screens which the poem stages stay obstinately blank, as language remains powerless in the face of grief paradoxically rendered impossible through writing.

Keywords

• Glück Louise
• mourning
• photography
• punctum
• deferment
• Barthes Roland