Louise Glück

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA 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.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA 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.

<div> <p>WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA luminous collection of essays from Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our most original and influential poetsFive decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück’s second book of essays—her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück’s moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection. From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of “narcissism” and “genius” that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.</p></div> <p><b>A luminous collection of essays from one of our most original and influential poets</b></p><p>Five decades after her debut poetry collection, <i>Firstborn</i>, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, <i>American Originality </i>is Glück's second book of essays&#8212;her first, <i>Proofs and Theories</i>, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück's moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection.</p><p> From its opening pages, <i>American Originality</i> forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of "narcissism" and "genius" that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses...

A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck's sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father's hollow life and her mother's inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter's belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-strong, deeply felt lyrics are steeled by love and understanding. </p>

'Brilliant poems of complex, haunting power... Averno may be Glück's masterpiece' The New York Times Book ReviewAn acclaimed collection from the Nobel prize-winning poetThis startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. Together, the poems of Averno swell to a staggeringly powerful lamentation, through which the reader glimpses the ecstasy of the inevitable, only to find it resisted by the insistent, impersonal presence of the Earth.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREWinner of the National Book Award for PoetryA luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureLouise Glück 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 it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball. "Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder. Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for PoetryA luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize–winning poetLouise Glück 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 it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball. " Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, for 'her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal', Louise Gluck takes a new direction in a fable which returns to essential questions, of identity and belonging, of desire and the creative impulse. The twins, Marigold and Rose, in their first year, begin to piece together the world as they move between Mother's stories of 'Long, long ago' and Father's 'Once upon a time'. Impressions, repeated, begin to make sense. The rituals of bathing and burping are experienced differently by each. The story is about beginnings, each of which is an ending of what has come before. There is comedy in the progression, the stages of recognition, and in the ironic anachronisms which keep the babies alert, surprised, prescient and resigned. Charming, resonant, written with Gluck's characteristic poise and curiosity, Marigold and Rose unfolds as a new kind of creation myth.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureIn an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided Odysseus, and a shrewd adolescent Telemachus. Through these classical figures, Meadowlands explores such timeless themes as the endless negotiation of family life, the cruelty that intimacy enables, and the frustrating trivia of the everyday. Gluck discovers in contemporary life the same quandary that lies at the heart of The Odyssey: the "unanswerable/affliction of the human heart: how to divide/the world's beauty into acceptable/and unacceptable loves. "

<P>It is the astonishment of Louise Gl&#252;ck'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&#8212;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&#8212;persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made. <BR> From the outset ("<I>Come here / Come here, little one</I>"), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "do not see the intervening fathoms." <BR><I>From within the earth's<BR>bitter disgrace,... <p>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"), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "do not see the intervening fathoms.</p> <p>" From within the earth'sbitter disgrace, coldness and barrennessmy 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.</p>

A major career-spanning collection from the inimitable Nobel Prize-winning poetFor the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest poets. From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the myth-making of Averno; the oneiric landscapes of The House on Marshland to the questing of Faithful and Virtuous Night - each of Glück's collections looks upon the events of an ordinary life and finds within them scope for the transcendent; each wields its archetypes to puncture the illusions of the self. Across her work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured - 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. Taken together, the effect is like a shifting landscape seen from above, at once familiar and unspeakably profound.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureProofs and Theories, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise Glück, one of this country's most brilliant poets. Like her poems, the prose of Glück, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for The Wild Iris, is compressed, fastidious, fierce, alert, and absolutely unconsoled. 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 "sincerity" and "courage. " Here also are Glück's revealing reflections on her own education and life as a poet, and a tribute to her teacher and mentor, Stanley Kunitz. Proofs and Theories is not a casual collection. It is the testament of a major poet.

<p>The complete acceptance speech of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.</p> <p>The Nobel Prize committee selected poet and author Louise Glück "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.</p> <p>" Here is the full text of her Nobel Lecture given on December 7, 2020.</p> The complete acceptance speech of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. The complete acceptance speech of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. The complete acceptance speech of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureWinner of the Pulitzer PrizeFrom Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realmsBound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück'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 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 of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.

<p><b>A haunting new book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes</b><br>The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the <i>Wild Iris</i> there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. <i>Winter Recipes from the Collective</i> is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, <i>dolente</i>, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, <i>animoso</i>, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister's death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. "Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, by which she means,... <p>In the fifteen poems and sequences in Louise Gluck's rapt new collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective, speaker and the reader seem to move, or be moved, in the same channel, their agency suspended as each poem proceeds. The consciousness is looking away from itself and in this looking away it reveals itself most truly, in the hopes (which do not seem illusory) that a story seeds and in the distresses (which might have been avoidable) that it encounters. In 'A Children's Story', we are in a real fairy tale, one in which the girls are princesses capable of so much and yet incapable also, apparently free and yet subject, subjected. 'Everything has ended,' the poem called 'The Sentence' begins, 'And if that is the case / there is no point in beginning / so much as a sentence.' And yet, the poem, the poems continue, sustained as ever by Gluck's typically piercing, quizzical scrutinies. Cut adrift by lovers, teachers, without even, in one sequence, a passport which would free them to move on, the poems are marooned in particular circumstances, observing pasts on the point of vanishing, alert as ever to the daily cycles that persist, and considering a future to which time appears prepared to move on without its human subjects. The poems are staging posts in a visionary account of the human predicament, stories and fables whose isolation touches readers as the most intimate address.</p> <p><b>A haunting new book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes</b><br>The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the <i>Wild Iris</i> there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. <i>Winter Recipes from the Collective</i> is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, <i>dolente</i>, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, <i>animoso</i>, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister's death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. "Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, by which she means,... <p><b>A haunting new book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes</b><br>The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the <i>Wild Iris</i> there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. <i>Winter Recipes from the Collective</i> is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, <i>dolente</i>, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, <i>animoso</i>, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister's death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. "Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, by which she means,... <p><b>A haunting new book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes</b><br>The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the <i>Wild Iris</i> there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. <i>Winter Recipes from the Collective</i> is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, <i>dolente</i>, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, <i>animoso</i>, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister's death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. "Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, by which she means,...