Village Life: Poems - The Poetry Shop

Village Life: Poems

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Village Life: Poems - The Poetry Shop

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Village Life: Poems

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Sale price  $16.00 Regular price 
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WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A dreamlike collection from the Nobel Prize-winning poet

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:

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 opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.

Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. 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. 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.

Book Details

Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN:
9780374532437
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
80
Authors:
Louise Glück
Published Date:
2010-09-14
Language:
English

About Louise Glück

Louise Glück (1943–2023) was born in New York City and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. Her collection The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993, and Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) won the National Book Award. Other collections include Ararat (1990), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), and Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). She was writer in residence at Yale University and a senior lecturer at Stanford. Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the 2001 Bollingen Prize.

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