A Village Life

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Overview

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,...

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Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

William Logan
Gluck remains our great poet of annihilation and disgust, our demigoddess of depression. At her discomforting best, she reminds me of no poet more than Rilke, who was also a case of nerves and who also lived close to the old myths. Though her comments about him have been hedged, of all the Americans now writing Gluck is the closest to being his secret mythographer. Her silences fall at times like moral resistance, and the most striking lines of her chatter are as haunting as an elegy for herself.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize–winner Glück's 11th collection is set in an unidentified rural hill town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Less narrative than it is impressionistic, the book takes its undulating shape from natural cycles—the obvious but nonetheless awesome impact of days and seasons changing. Glück has shown herself to be an astute, heartbreaking and often funny observer of everyday violence. In poems like “At the River” and “Marriage,” she tracks life's messy movement from innocence and curiosity through lust, loss, anger and resignation. However, the relationships she studies are as much to the land—with its single, looming mountain, worked fields and increasingly dried-up river—as between individuals. Glück's achievement in this collection is to show, through the exigencies of the place she has chosen, how interpersonal relationships are formed, shaped and broken by the particular landscape in which they unfurl. Though the poems are intimate and deeply sympathetic, there remains the suggestion of a distance between Glück and the village life she writes about. When she declaims, “No one really understands/ the savagery of this place,” it feels as though she is speaking less about her chosen subjects than about herself. (Sept.)
Library Journal
What makes a great poem? Voice, as former U.S. poet laureate Glück said in Proofs & Theories, her 1994 essay collection; poems will not survive on content alone. The Wild Iris, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and established Glück as a poet to be reckoned with, offers a telling example of the mesmerizing power of voice. Unfortunately, only a few of the poems in this 11th collection could be called mesmerizing. Written from the outside looking in, the poems concern love, courtship, sexual liaisons, birth, and death as experienced by ordinary inhabitants of a nameless village, as well as the earthworms, bats, dogs, and mice that co-inhabit the place. A first-person narrator holds the poems together and gives the collection its somewhat bleak focus. VERDICT Readers will be reminded of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, especially as the poet notes the underlying "savagery of this place,/ the way it kills people for no reason." But instead of presenting an insightful portrait brimming with irony à la Masters, Glück's poetry seems more like a quick sketch. Recommended for those who read poetry extensively.—Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780374532437
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publication date: 9/14/2010
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 80
  • Sales rank: 617,838
  • Product dimensions: 6.94 (w) x 11.28 (h) x 0.28 (d)

Meet the Author

Louise Glück is the author of eleven books of poems and a collection of essays. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 5, 2010

    Highly recommended

    Strikingly clear imagery and a use of the language that is breathtaking. A master at work.

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    Posted March 10, 2012

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