Faithful and Virtuous Night Poems [Paperback]

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry

A luminous, seductive new collection from the fearless (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prizewinning poet

Louise Gl?ck is one of the finest American poets at work today. HerPoems 19622012was hailed as a major event in this country's literature in the pages ofThe New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation.Faithful and Virtuous Nightis 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 Nighttells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

One reason Gl?ck has proved so central to American poetry, for five decades now, lies in her remarkable talent for recapturing wonder. For all her disabused austerity, she remains a great poet of renewal. This is not a matter of optimism, or recovery' in the conventional sense. Rather, fol£'