(h) Short story as lyric poem:

“As though I’m fooled. That lacy body managed to forget
That I have eyes, ears; dares to spring her boyfriends on the child.”

It’s impossible to do this one justice in a commentary that’s going to end up three times longer than the poem; really I should just quote the whole thing, but I don’t think that’s allowed. It’s a classic kitchen-sink, upstairs-downstairs tale of Edwardian melodrama, ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ set in pre-WWI Bloomsbury, except it’s told from the nursemaid’s point of view and with stunning economy. If a short story is a novel with all the unnecessary words taken out, then this poem is a short story with all of its unnecessary words utterly excised. Glück’s body of work encompasses many of these stripped-down narratives — ‘Archipelago’ for instance is The Odyssey reset as a terrifying 11-line micro-horror-story. ‘Nurse’s Song’ hovers on the edge of jealousy and vengeance without descending into either, and in ten lines of good-hearted plaint (but with a stinging kick at the end) tells a whole tale of decadence and deceit and hubris, and of what that might do to a child of such a marriage, and of how only the unnoticed servant can see the damage or care enough to do anything about it.

Collected in Firstborn, The New American Library, 1968, and in Poems 1962-2020, Penguin Classics, 2021