The writing is often hauntingly beautiful.

The poems in A Village Life combine the intensity of her early work and the longer lines and insight of more recent books. “This 11th book of verse by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück offers beautiful language with a sense of loss and disappointment. It says begin again, you begin again.' Louise Glück begins again, unforgettably, in this profound new collection of poems.” - Carol Muske-Dukes, Huffington Post The characters in A Village Life do what the voice tells them. “Here is a poet at the unmistakable peak of her expressive power and experience. This collection, her 11th, is frightening the way a living statue would be frightening if it were to smile at you.” - Dana Goodyear, Los Angeles Times Glück is a master, finely calibrating the shocks and their intervals. “Not many poets can be electrifying while keeping the stakes this hypothermically low. 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.” - Rosanna Warren, The New Republic “ A Village Life magnificently extends the landscapes, the harmonics, and the dramatis personae of Averno. 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.” - Adam Fitzgerald, Rain Taxi shows a ripening of Glück's genius, her mastery for depicting the things of this earth. “Though it resembles her others least, A Village Life may come to be seen as Glück's most beautiful and moving book so far. 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. 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. Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed. On sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.Īround 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. The fountain rises at the center of the plaza 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:Īll the roads in the village unite at the fountain.Īvenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees.

Averno by Louise Glück