I tell you about Louise Gluck.

I recently bought a book of Louise Gluck's poetry. It's entitled 'The First Four Books of Poetry,' and that's what it is: her first four volumes, assembled into one. Upon reading just the first few poems, I was thrilled that I'd finally decided to buy some of her work. She is elegant but she is modern, she is sexy but she is restrained.

On an Academy of American Poets DVD that profiled her -- and three other Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, who were men -- she was fascinating to watch. She openly told her interviewer that she loathed public poetry readings; she described the way someone reading a poem aloud interferes with her experience of the poem on the page. I was struck by this: no lip service to the fact that poetry was, for a long time, an oral tradition. In a way, I know what she means: her thin body, her New York accent, and her slow, painstaking delivery haunt my own silent readings of her poetry. But it doesn't bother me one bit. Somehow, despite knowing how she hates to read her own work aloud, I find her an arresting performer.

She says her favorite book of her own poetry is "Descending Figure." That's not the one that won the Pulitzer - who cares? I am in love with her.

I may add to this later.