A Village Life: Poems (Hardcover)

~ Louise Glück (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“In the work of no other contemporary American poet is the individual psyche so unsparingly portrayed in both the anguish and the humor with which it confronts its profound solitude and the twin darknesses which precede birth and follow life . . . [Glück] deals with powerful emotions, expressed in a language of surpassing clarity and spareness, full of passion and devoid of sentiment.”—Judges’ Citation, Bollingen Prize, 2001

“Glück stands at the center of time and speaks not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul.”—Partisan Review

“I cannot imagine the world of contemporary poetry without Glück’s work, which is a way of saying that without her work I cannot imagine the world. For twenty years I have been listening to Louise Glück’s poems for lessons in some of the cardinal literary virtues, which include, foremost, the shunning of virtuosity; her work is, in my estimation, not merely poetry, but pedagogy, creed, philosophy—a set of daunting, shining standards that we as readers should strive to live up to . . . Her poems assert that to speak is to be horrified. [They make] an array of evidence that language, in our culture, has not been cheapened to the point of dirt.”—Wayne Koestenbaum

Product Description

A Village Life, Louise Glück’s eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:

 

All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.

Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—

The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;

on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.

—from “tributaries”

 

Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain’s opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.

Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as “the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry,” as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück’s manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374283745
• ISBN-13: 978-0374283742
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,312 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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