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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionsA Village Lifeby Louise Gluck
AwardsA National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Shortlisted for Griffin Poetry Prize Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:A Village Life, Louise Glücks 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 fountains 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. Review:“Louise Glück is one of Americas most famous poets, and one of the best.... The fictions here are really a pretext for Glück to stage poems that explore, for the first time, material that is neither explicitly her own biography nor that of her mythical stand-ins. Always at the mercy of the Greek gods that inspired her earlier poems, Glück now is playing God herself.” Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review:“Though it resembles her others least, A Village Life may come to be seen as Glück's most beautiful and moving book so far... [It] shows a ripening of Glück's genius, her mastery for depicting the things of this earth...[and] can be seen as the work of a master poet who has done what many poets long to do: she has written about death immortally.” Rain Taxi
Review:“A Village Life magnificently extends the landscapes, the harmonics, and the dramatis personae of Averno ... More than any of Glück's previous volumes, A Village Life has a generous heart, a large spiritual scope in which to imagine the lives of others.” The New Republic
Review:“Not many poets can be electrifying while keeping the stakes this hypothermically low. Glück is a master, finely calibrating the shocks and their intervals. This collection, her 11th, is frightening the way a living statue would be frightening if it were to smile at you.” Los Angeles Times
Review:“Here is a poet at the unmistakable peak of her expressive power and experience... The characters in A Village Life do what the voice tells them. ‘It says forget, you forget. / It says begin again, you begin again.' Louise Glück begins again, unforgettably, in this profound new collection of poems.” Huffington Post
Review:“This 11th book of verse by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück offers beautiful language with a sense of loss and disappointment....The poems in A Village Life combine the intensity of her early work and the longer lines and insight of more recent books. The writing is often hauntingly beautiful....There are stanzas where Glück makes her landscape seem so radiant or exquisite that you don't want to turn the page.” Christian Science Monitor
Review:“Like Cavafy's persona pieces, the real subject of these poems is often a particular mood, not the transmission of details that distinguish, say, a child's voice from a farmers.... Glück lets us hear the silence that follows in the confessional. In my favorite poems in A Village Life, she also shows us what one who has heard that silence can now say.” Kenyon Review
Synopsis:A Village Life, Louise Glücks 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 fountains 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 Glücks 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. About the AuthorLouise Glück is the author of eleven books of poems and a collection of essays. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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