I interviewed Louise on Tuesday 24 November 2009 and we began by chatting about Hakan Nesser’s latest detective story. I knew he was a writer she enjoys. ‘Reading Woman with Birthmark¹ will be two days of escape from life,’ she said.

YVONNE GREEN: The boundary you create between your poems and your reader seems to me to have the draw of the magnetic field suggested in the final stanza from ‘Lost Love’,² in Ararat:

…when my sister died,
my mother’s heart became
very cold, very rigid,
like a tiny pendant of iron.

Then it seemed to me my sister’s body
was a magnet. I could feel it draw
my mother’s heart into the earth,
so it would grow.

LOUISE GLÜCK: I haven’t thought of those lines in decades. I have no sense of myself in relation to the reader and I don’t know that the reader is paradigmatic that way. There may be all sorts of modes of relation. It also seems to me that each book reinvents that relation. I may change my mind about this.

I think there’s a language of response in the reader who reads each new venture of yours, or rereads a collection she knows. Let’s look at the other side of my question. Your latest collection is A Village Life.³ Have you left the Village? Does it cease to exist for you? For ...