A Village Life: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780374532437)

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A dreamlike collection from the Nobel Prize-winning poet

A Village Life, Louise Gl?k'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?k 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 Gl?k'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.

Author: Louise Gl?k
ISBN-10: 0374532435
ISBN-13: 9780374532437
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English
Published: 09/14/2010
Pages: 80
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.25lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.70w x 0.30d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 10/10/2010 pg. 28