The Wild Iris

The Wild Iris is a book of poems by Louise Glück, the American poet who later received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The collection won the Pulitzer Prize. Its poems move between the natural world, human experience and the spiritual realm, and time and mortality run through all of them.

The setting is largely a garden. The poems are spoken by different voices: the flowers, the gardener who tends them, and the god the gardener addresses. Through these voices Glück questions and examines what it means to be alive, and in the end affirms it, with precise and controlled craft.