Bøger af Louise Gluck

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for PoetryA luminous, seductive new collection from the "e;fearless"e; (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poetLouise Gluck is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "e;a major event in this country's literature"e; in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is 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 "e;on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball"e; and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "e;the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball."e; Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

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 ("e;Come here / Come here, little one"e;), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "e;do not see the intervening fathoms."e; From within the earth'sbitter disgrace, coldness and barrennessmy 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.

The themes of the previous volume of poetry define the tasks of the next for Louise Gluck. This collection shows the poet in this evolution. It includes: "Firstborn" (1968); "The House on Marshland" (1975); "Descending Figure" (1980); "The Triumph of Achilles" (1985); and "Ararat" (1990).

Averno, a crater lake in southern Italy, was for the Romans the entrance to the underworld, both gateway and impassable barrier between the living and the dead. This collection shows Averno as the only source of heat and light in a world turned to icy winter. Both epic and intimate in scope, it explores the enduring drama of love and death.

Louise Gluck's collection is a work of ends and beginnings. Her poetry comes in white-hot sequences of passionate intensity. "Vita Nova" is a sequence of poems which dramatises the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new life.

In contemplating her own death, Louise Gluck confronts the possible and the inevitable in this, her ninth and boldest book.

Includes "Penelope's Song" in which the author interweaves in a book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's "Odyssey". This collection of poetry also explores the notion of the "nostos", the homecoming.