Abstract: Garden is one of the major images recurring throughout the poetry of Louise Glück. In The Wild Iris, the garden is not only the breeding ground of monologues and dialogues, but also the theatre of verbal confrontations between characters. From the multiple perspective of plants, humans, and God, the poet “endows them with a voice” for the sake of constructing the self and its multi-faceted identities. This article aims to trace the Hebraic and Hellenic roots of the image of garden that appears as a “place of care” in several collections of Glück's poetry, with a particular emphasis on the garden as a site of speech acts in The Wild Iris, and to examine its polyphonic narration delivered mostly by ventriloquism by flowers, prayers by the gardener, and confessions by God in order to understand, more thoroughly, Glück's protean lyrical voice that is at once individual and universal.

Key words: Glück, garden, polyphony, lyrical voice