A Village Life Poems [Paperback]

A Village Life, Louise Gl?ck'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.

Gl?ck 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 linesexpansive, fluent, and fullmanifesting a calm omniscience. While Gl?ck'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.

Louise Gl?ckis 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.

Though it resembles her others least,A Village Lifemay come to be seen as Gl?ck's most beautiful and moving book so far . . . [It] shows a ripening of Gl?ck's genius, her mastery for depicting the things of this earth . . . [and] can be seen as the work of a master poet who has done what many poets long to do: she has written aboulSF