Synopses & Reviews
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
It is the astonishment of Louise Glück's poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape — Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain — persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made.
From the outset (Come here / Come here, little one), Glück's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we do not see the intervening fathoms.
From within the earth's
bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness
my friend the moon rises:
she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?
To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.
Review
"Eleven previous collections are gathered here, echoing with synergistic reverberations…Glück's assembled life's work of shadow and fire, driven by 'perception of beauty, desire for knowledge, ' is magnificent." Booklist
Review
“Though Glück has held national fame since the late 1970s for her terse, pared-down poems, this first career-spanning collected may be the most widely noted, and the most praised, collected poems in some time.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
“Ms. Glück's new and career-spanning Poems 1962-2012 is a major event in this country's literature, perhaps this year's most major…Put together, these compact volumes have a great novel's cohesiveness and raking moral intensity.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Review
"Glück's Poems 1962-2012 is a big book by a poet who values, above all, intensity of address, leanness of sentiment, and precision of speech…[She is] among the most moving poets of our era.” Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
Review
"Glück is as important and influential a poet as we have in America...Glück's work is all edges...the sharper ones can inflict heavenly hurt, where the meanings are. If you want to know about the last half-century of American poetry, you need to read these poems." Michael Robbins, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
"Since 1962 few American poets have succeeded as well in writing as a poet of poise as Louise Glück…Glück forces pain to take a bow in her poems…Her poems convulse, twinge, and even gripe.” David Biespiel, The Oregonian
Review
"Glück's voice is like no other in modern American poetry…The seamless continuity of her verse suggests a mind in perpetual meditation, deliberating in a state of waking dream. Her laserlike intensity purifies as it objectifies and erodes, leaving an indelible impression on the reader." Rita Signorelli-Pappas, World Literature Today
About the Author
Louise Glück is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a collection of essays. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems: 1962-2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.