Vita Nova (Paperback)

~ Louise Gluck (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

No poet has grafted her life more stubbornly to myth than Louise Glück. In Meadowlands, this meant voyaging simultaneously through the Odyssey and the disintegration of her marriage; in Vita Nova, the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice provides a backdrop to the bitter aftermath of divorce. "No one wants to be the muse; / in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus," Glück pithily notes, but here, she assumes both voices--the grieving artist and his doubly silenced love. "How would you like to die / while Orpheus was singing? / A long death; all the way to Dis / I heard him," the nymph complains in "Relic," while in "Orfeo," the bard dwells almost lovingly on both his loss and his art:

I have lost my Eurydice,
I have lost my lover,
and suddenly I am speaking French
and it seems to me I have never been in better voice;
it seems these songs
are songs of a high order.

In the end, of course, it's not Eurydice but his own pain that Orpheus immortalizes. "I made a harp of disaster / to perpetuate the beauty of my last love," Glück admits, but this is less a matter of personal glory than it is of sheer survival. And besides, she reminds us, "sometimes / our consolations are the costliest thing."

Glück is an excruciatingly honest poet, but not, exactly, a confessional one. Vita Nova holds her life at arm's length, examining its particulars with almost Olympian detachment. Several of these poems include a self-interrogation, rendered in a voice equal parts prosecutor and witness for the defense: "Ask her how he touched her." "Ask her what she remembers." "Ask her if the fire hurts," demands a speaker in "The Burning Heart." Is this Eurydice's story as accident report? Séance? Cross-examination? Elsewhere, her troubles come rendered in a piercing gallows wit. In the volume's final poem, "Vita Nova" (the second of two with that same title), she dreams a dog, then dreams a custody fight with her ex. Be brave, she tells her hypothetical pet--"this is / all material; you'll wake up / in a different world, / you will eat again, you will grow up into a poet!" One senses that for Glück, it's all material--marriage, divorce, life, death, even and especially the ancient drama of myth. These are poems of rebirth, but of a particular kind--not of hope, and certainly not of youth, but of something far more important: poetry itself. In "The Nest," as Glück emerges from her grief, she feels her mind once again engage with the world, thinking "first, I love it. / Then, I can use it." --Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"Surely spring has been returned to me, this time/ not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet/ it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly." Reutrning to the seasonal myths inaugurated in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992), Gluck's new poems chronicle delvings-down and rebeginnings, very much in the way her last book, Meadowlands, took on autumns and endings. Her chosen myth is now Orpheus, her other new interests dreams, dream-states and fragmentary memories. Meadowlands had tracked the slow collapse of Gluck's marriage; Vita Nova follows Gluck into the aftermath: "I thought my life was over and my heart was broken./ Then I moved to Cambridge." (That is, Cambridge, Mass., where some of these poems, such as "Ellsworth Avenue," are set.) Gluck has long mastered the bitter, detachable aphorism: "You saved me, you should remember me." "No one wants to be the muse;/ in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus." To these she adds, now, the surprisingly conversational aside: "Mommy's/ too ironic?Mommy wouldn't do/ the rhumba in the driveway." Gluck also casts poems partly in dialogue, from the terse interrogator of "The Burning Heart" ("Ask her if she regrets anything") to "the leaves" of "Evening Prayers": "Bedtime, they whisper./ Time to begin lying." The poems rely on negative space?on what's left out?and on psychological acuity; their stripped-down self-analyses cast their cold illumination far past her own life. Gluck's psychic wounds will impress new readers, but it is Gluck's austere, demanding craft that makes much of this seventh collection equal the best of her previous work?bitter, stark, careful, guiltily inward, alert to myth. It is astonishing in its self-knowledge, and above all, memorable.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (March 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060957956
• ISBN-13: 978-0060957957
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #400,828 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gluck at her most distraught and extreme., July 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Vita Nova: Poems (Hardcover)

Gluck's work should be read fully. She is hard to browse through, not only because she writes her individual collections as novels, but because all eight books continue the story of her life, poems chorusing and coruscating. The surrealist yearnings of Firstborn, the development of wry rhetoric to hide real paing through Triumph of Achilles, the deadly precision of Ararat, all culminated in a ferociously ecstatic (in a biblical sense) book, Wild Iris. Since then, Gluck has been in new territory and taking a lot of flak for it. Vita Nova lacks the iron control usually associated with Gluck. She is trembling in this book, vulnerable. Her cracks beging to show. Indeed the myth is stitched clumsily to the life, because Gluck has had a go at depicting her favorite subject (herself) literally coming apart at the seams. Its a triumphant continuation of her work, and, as always, I am breathless to see what she does next. And next.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vita Nova, no new news, July 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Vita Nova: Poems (Hardcover)

Louise Gluck practices poetry like few others in the language. She does not write single poems; rather, she constructs volumes, she forms arcs of narrative and progression from single poems into books. Vita Nova, for me, does not succeed either as a volume, nor as a collection of individual poems. The central organizing logic, once again myth, the love of Orpheus and Euridice, offers few new insights into the tediums and betrayal and insoluble dilemmas of love. It is as if Gluck is traveling in a groove she has worn well over the years, perhaps too well. The stitching of myth with her own life was done better, though still clumsily, in Meadowlands. This is not Ararat, nor is it The Wild Iris, nor Descending Figure, volumes that invoke ache. Still, there are some excellent poems in this volume, some heartbreaking lines, and lines that communicate with immediacy and grace and utter wryness ("I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. Then my heart was broken."). But there are also poems that drag, mired in their own metaphors. Uncompelling. This is a volume that perhaps her seasoned readers will have to learn to love, at least appreciate, like Meadowlands. For those who are not familiar with Gluck, be assured that even this outing, not her best, still outshines most poets publishing today. For a true introduction, beginning readers should start with Ararat or The Wild Iris. Vita Nova should be saved for a time when you love her so much, you'll be able to forgive her at her half-mast. In the fleet of her own work, this is no flagship.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Orpheus and Eurydice--Revisted, March 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Vita Nova: Poems (Hardcover)

Though I don't feel this volume of poetry compares to some of Gluck's previous works ("Descending Figure," "The Wild Iris"), "Vita Nova" does evoke a great deal of sympathy for the doomed mythological lovers Orpheus and Eurydice. Throughout, the poet questions the aging process and the fact that spring, while functioning as a bringer of new life, also brings death and perpetuates loss. As in "Meadowlands," there are many poems which speak to subsequent poems, or include rich, sometimes funny, dialogue. Overall, "Vita Nova" is unusual with respect to subject-matter and is beautifully-written.