Awards
2014 National Book Award for Poetry
Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry
A luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
Louise Gluck is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception.
You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.
Review
"Glück...navigates gracefully through the dark, without and within, via a poetic form of echolocation, bursting out now and then into summer's bright carnival and the white blaze of snow." Booklist
Review
"Here she is more conversational, more grounded in the materiality of human experience....Glück speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings." Publishers Weekly
Review
“The high art and deep pleasure of Faithful and Virtuous Night derive from...moments of startling presence, when everyday facts turn magical, when disenchantment itself leads to renewed enchantment.” Peter Campion, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Gluck writes with a timeless quality....Her richness of thought and restrained, melancholy voice call forth the rhythms of the broken heart: beating valiantly in quiet desolation.” Arlice Davenport, Wichita Eagle
Review
“Glück's new collection of poems finds cinematic scope through a deeply personal lens. Moving and rich, her mastery of what she knows is matched only by her ease with the uncertain.” Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe
About the Author
Louise 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 for Poetry, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.