Vita Nova: Poems

By Louise Glück and Louise Gluck

Book Overview

Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Gluck has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova -- like its immediate predecessors, a booklength sequence -- combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring: a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope; brutal, luminous, and farseeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Gluck compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Gluck manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880016345
• ISBN13: 9780880016346
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Ecco
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful

Even though, I'm not american i must say that this the best poetry book i've read in 1999. It's a wonderful book

My Poetry Book Of The Year

As a poetry reader who starts his every day by reading poetry,this book was my favorite for the year of 1999.Ms. Gluck should get a Nobel Prize so that other parts of the world can enjoy her masterpiece collections.

Gluck at her most distraught and extreme.

Gluck's work should be read fully. She is hard to browse through, not only because she writes her individual collections as novels, but because all eight books continue the story of her life, poems chorusing and coruscating. The surrealist yearnings of Firstborn, the development of wry rhetoric to hide real paing through Triumph of Achilles, the deadly precision of Ararat, all culminated in a ferociously ecstatic (in a biblical sense) book, Wild Iris. Since then, Gluck has been in new territory and taking a lot of flak for it. Vita Nova lacks the iron control usually associated with Gluck. She is trembling in this book, vulnerable. Her cracks beging to show. Indeed the myth is stitched clumsily to the life, because Gluck has had a go at depicting her favorite subject (herself) literally coming apart at the seams. Its a triumphant continuation of her work, and, as always, I am breathless to see what she does next. And next.

You saved me, you should remember me.

What the sea is: that we exist in secret. I wouldn't have imagined so much hope possible until I found these poems.

An excellent book

People who want to know what is going on in poetry these days ought to buy a copy of "Vita Nova" & keep it around the house. People who want to know what has always gone on in the best poetry ought to buy a copy of "Vita Nova" and carry it with them wherever they go.