Louise Glück

The author shares her dreamlike poetry, including "Theory of Memory," "The Melancholy Assistant," and "The Couple in the Park."

Poems

Faithful and Virtuous Night

from the poem “faithful and virtuous night”

sage lynn

It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided / into those who wish to move forward / and those who wish to go back. / Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving / and those who want to be stopped in their tracks

𓂃 𓈒𓏸

“but these farewells, i said, are the way of things.”

Jess Z

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 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.

rereading this after all her other collections hits different — magnum opus

chris

azliana aziz

i feel this meditation on death and loss deeply.

Jun Angelo Cabuguas

Donald

Another perfect collection. Glück is simply the best living poet in the language.

B. K.

3 stars (barely). I expected to love this, because I love Louise Glück's poetic style, and the thematic focus of this collection should have worked for me: time passing, nostalgia, the tension between past and future, life's brevity... Some of my favorite poetic subjects. However, a lot of this collection left me bored, despite the masterful use of language. My favorite of these poems are probably the first two, "Parable" and "An Adventure", along with "The Horse and Rider" and "A Work of Fiction."

Emma Younger

The new collection by Louise Gluck, the multi-award winning poet and former US Laureate."

Faithful and Virtuous Night Poems

Reviews

Highlights