It is the astonishment of Louise Gluck's poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made. From the outset (""Come here / Come here, little one""), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "do not see the intervening fathoms." "From within the earth's""bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness""""my friend the moon rises: ""she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?"""To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure."
- ISBN:
- 9780374126087
- 9780374126087
- Category:
- Poetry by individual poets
- Format:
- Hardback
- Publication Date:
- 13-11-2012
- Language:
- English
- Publisher:
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Country of origin:
- United States
- Pages:
- 656
- Dimensions (mm):
- 235x165x51mm
- Weight:
- 1.09kg
Click 'Notify Me' to get an email alert when this item becomes available
Great!
Click on Save to My Library / Lists
Click on Save to My Library / Lists
Select the List you'd like to categorise as, or add your own
Here you can mark if you have read this book, reading it or want to read
Awesome! You added your first item into your Library
Great! The fun begins.
Click on My Library / My Lists and I will take you there
Click on My Library / My Lists and I will take you there
Reviews
Be the first to review Poems 1962-2012.
Share This Book: