Louise Gluck has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal, and crude. The Seven Ages is Gluck's ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible -- an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation,...
Louise Gluck has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her b...
Since, 1990, Louise Gluck has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova -- like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence -- combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring, a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope, brutal, luminous, and farseeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Gluck compasses the essential...
Since, 1990, Louise Gluck has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova -- like its immediate pr...
The winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus's The Cuckoo, chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Gluck. It is Gluck's first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Gluck praises Streckfus's art for its "nonsense and mystery," its "mesmerizing beauty" and "luminous...
The winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus's The Cuckoo, chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise ...
Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Gluck observes in her foreword, "Green Squall begins and ends in the garden"; however, Hopler's gardens are not of the seasonal variety evoked by poets of the English lyric--his gardens flourish at lower, fiercer latitudes and in altogether different mindscapes. There is a darkness in Hopler's work as deep and brutal as any in American poetry. Though his verbal extravagance and formal invention bring to mind Wallace Stevens's tropical extrapolations, there lies beneath...
Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Gluck observes in her foreword, "<...
Jessica Fisher's Frail-Craft is Louise Gluck's fourth selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary prize in the United States. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, the poet meditates on the problems and possibilities, the frail craft, of perception for the reader or the dreamer, maintaining that 'if the eye can love - and it can, it does - then I held you and was held'. In her foreword to the book, Louise Gluck writes, 'What gives Jessica Fisher's work its sense of form, of repose, is her perfection of ear. That repose, with its strange mobility, its...
Jessica Fisher's Frail-Craft is Louise Gluck's fourth selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary prize in the United S...
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of...
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Lou...
In a powerful debut collection, fifty new poems by a poet who works in a mall men's store evokes the memory of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales while exploring the quite monastic life of two employees at Brooks Brothers. Original.
In a powerful debut collection, fifty new poems by a poet who works in a mall men's store evokes the memory of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales while explor...
This collection of stunningly beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.
This collection of stunningly beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes o...
Winner of the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, Proofs and Theories is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise Gluck, whose most recent book of poems, The Wild Iris, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Gluck brings to her prose the same precision of language, the same incisiveness and insight that distinguish her poetry. The force of her thought is evident everywhere in these essays, from her explorations of other poets' work to her skeptical contemplation of current literary critical notions such as "sincerety" and "courage." Here also are Gluck's...
Winner of the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, Proofs and Theories is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise G...
The First Four Books of Poems collects the early work that established Louise Gluck as one of America's most original and important poets. Honored with the Pulitzer Prize for The WildIris, Gluck was celebrated early in her career for her fierce, austerely beautiful voice. InFirstborn, The House on Marshland Wand, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles, which wonthe National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, we see the conscious progression of apoet who speaks with blade-like accuracy and stirring depth.
The First Four Books of Poems collects the early work that established Louise Gluck as one of America's most original and important poets....
