A Village Life, Louise Gluck's 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 fountain's...

The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

It is the astonishment of Louise Gluck'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...

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...