Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) is the most recent poetry collection by American poet Louise Glück. Glück has said that, just before writing the poems in the collection, she was reading a lot of prose—and specifically, a lot of Iris Murdoch, whose cheekiness and wisdom appealed greatly to her. She had not written anything in over two years, but after rereading Murdoch, she found herself writing trivia at first, but then writing a series of lyrics attempting to capture a dream-like quality. Over a period that took her much longer than usual for her poetry collections (5 years), Glück then began to explore in her work the story at the heart of the collection—that is, the story of the English artist orphaned at a young age and raised by his aunt. Glück has said that the original story of the collection followed "a child who lived in a farmhouse with her mother who took in sewing," but after reconsidering who her narrative was for and what she could accomplish through its perspective, she changed the story to its current iteration. After bouncing ideas regarding this story off of her friends, Glück was then recommended to read the short stories of Kafka. This eventually lead to her breakthrough into prose poetry, one of the prominent formal innovations present in the text. Another thing that Glück has said influenced her significantly while working on the collection was maintenance of low expectations. The fact that there seemed to her so much less urgency in her writing (compared to her younger days) made her think about her progress towards death, as well as the ways in which urgency gives way to complacency and, ultimately, silence. This end-of-life perspective is also central to much of the work in Faithful and Virtuous Night.
As mentioned, while the collection advances in a series of unrelated vignettes, prose poems, and standard lyric poems, a major focus of Faithful and Virtuous Night is the story of one of Glück's personas—a gay, male, British artist who is orphaned at a young age and is raised with his brother and aunt in an imaginary English countryside. Upon reaching old age and traveling to Montana to reconnect with his brother, this artist falls in with his nephew, who accompanies him back to England. Many of the poems in the collection then trace this artist's journey, offer us his meditations on growing old and approaching death, and provide us with his aesthetic fixations on death, purity, silence, emptiness, and clarity. At times, such reflections seem to be straight from Glück herself, albeit behind the thin mask of this artist. Still, there are many moments in the collection in which Glück emerges herself to offer commentary on these ideas, moments in which the artist himself seems to emerge as a distinct figure, and moments in which we are merely left to think and meditate as we wander through prose poems that, like a Zen koan, capture both a sublime and purposeless emptiness.
Because of these thematic fixations on silence, enlightenment, death, and craft, many critics have remarked that this poetry collection allowed Glück to reinvent herself through the new vantage point offered to her by the understanding of her own mortality. Where her earlier collections have seen her turn to nature to regain or relocate something lost within her, this collection sees her search for meaning within the everyday and toeing the line between revelation and disappointment—at times allowing herself to fall into quiet disconsolation and at times approaching a kind of humble and mundane ecstasy. As The New York Times' Peter Campion writes: "This is what makes 'Faithful and Virtuous Night' so moving: Even as she admits that our forms of knowledge, the stories with which we understand the world and ourselves, are contingent and flawed, Glück suggests such stories are no less necessary or real." The New Yorker's Dan Chiasson, too, has remarked on the tension between certainty and illusion in the collection, saying that the text "is governed by the logic of medieval dream vision, where the enigmas of the day are not resolved but, rather, reconceived as symbol and allegory." The Boston Review's Craig Morgan Teicher, too, lauded the wonky and strange logic used by Glück in the book to both focus on and deflect attention away from the moment of death, saying that "what Glück struggles [in the collection] to do, and what she comes closer to doing than anyone I can think of, is to render, vividly, what might immediately precede that change, that transfer of the self to oblivion—a place from which no poet, no matter how patient and precise, can report."
At the same time, however, many critics did not overtly praise the collection, remarking that the hazy, equivocal quality of its poems seemed to lose something when compared to the unequivocal and razor-sharp language of Glück's earlier work. NPR's Annalisa Quinn, for example, both praised the suggestive capacity of such poems in the collection while also reservedly critiquing the lack of definition in their structure and content. Nonetheless, the collection was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
