Louise Glück

The eleventh collection by the author of "Averno" and "Ararat" includes the piece "Tributaries," an exploration of a timeless Mediterranean village and the contrast between its natural and architectural elements.

Poems

A Village Life

Donald

I love Louise Glück, but I can't force myself to finish this. It's commendable that she attempted such a change in style so far into her career, but the experiment didn't work.

With black humour and luminously crafted lyricism, these poems weave together the stories of an unnamed rural village. We meet children with unspoken secrets and adults on the verge of adultery, living against a natural world that is blind and ravenous.

Nadia

It was alright

It was nice reading it at night under a small light with the wind and rain on the other side of the wall. It fit the mood I feel 

To reread probably. I feel like I could get it more a second time around, who knows

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.

Olivia Konstanse

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.

A Village Life Poems

Reviews