The Seven Ages

The Seven Ages

by Louise Glück
The Seven Ages

The Seven Ages

by Louise Glück

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

The masterful collection from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Wild Iris and Vita Nova

Louise Glück has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle’s metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal and crude. The Seven Ages is Glück’s ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in doing do, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible—an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader’s spine.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060933494
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 03/26/2002
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 80
Sales rank: 522,415
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Seven Ages

In my first dream the world appeared
the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, the sweet
In my second I descended

I was human, I couldn't just see a thing
beast that I am

I had to touch, to contain it

I hid in the groves,
I Worked in the fields until the fields were bare—

time
that will never come again—
the dry wheat bound, caskets
of figs and olives

I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way

and like everyone I called that accomplishment
erotic freedom,
absurd as it seems

The wheat gathered and stored, the last
fruit dried: time

that is hoarded, that is never used,
does it also end?

In my first dream the world appeared
the sweet, the forbidden
but there was no garden, only
raw elements

I was human:
I had to beg to descend

the salt, the bitter, the demanding, the preemptive

And like everyone, I took, I was taken
I dreamed

I was betrayed:

Earth was given to me in a dream
In a dream I possessed it

Table of Contents

The Seven Ages3
Moonbeam5
The Sensual World6
Mother and Child8
Fable9
Solstice10
Stars11
Youth13
Exalted Image15
Reunion17
Radium18
Birthday20
Ancient Text22
From A Journal24
Island27
The Destination28
The Balcony29
Copper Beech30
Study of My Sister31
August32
Summer at the Beach34
Rain in Summer35
Civilization37
Decade38
The Empty Glass39
Quince Tree41
The Traveler43
Arboretum44
Dream of Lust46
Grace48
Fable49
The Muse of Happiness50
Ripe Peach52
Unpainted Door55
Mitosis56
Eros58
The Ruse59
Time61
Memoir62
Saint Joan63
Aubade65
Screened Porch66
Summer Night67
Fable68
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