Poems 1962-2012

Product Description
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer Prize–winning poetIt is the astonishment of Louise Glück'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'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.
Review
“Ms. Glück's new and career-spanning Poems 1962-2012 is a major event in this country's literature, perhaps this year's most major . . . Put together, these compact volumes have a great novel's cohesiveness and raking moral intensity. They display a supple and prosecutorial mind interrogating not merely her own life but also the sensual and political nature of the world that spins around it.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times“Glück's Poems 1962-2012 is a big book by a poet who values, above all, intensity of address, leanness of sentiment, and precision of speech . . . [She is] among the most moving poets of our era . . . Glück's innovation, in her best early poems, was to borrow the coolest American style and apply it to the hottest material: she was an objectivist of the emotions . . . This voice is not going to go away.” ―Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker“Glück's latest volume . . . reminds us that she has been not only a resourceful and versatile poet but also an astonishingly brave one. Brave in what sense? In the way she has steadily enlarged her range and idiom, working, to be sure, within the compass of her own nature, but ever testing the limits of her gift, so that the impression made by the work as a whole is not of limitation but of an overwhelming fullness of invention and abundance of life.” ―Robert Boyers, The Nation“Glück is as important and influential a poet as we have in America . . . Glück's work is all edges . . . the sharper ones can inflict heavenly hurt, where the meanings are. If you want to know about the last half-century of American poetry, you need to read these poems.” ―Michael Robbins, The Los Angeles Review of Books“Since 1962 few American poets have succeeded as well in writing as a poet of poise as Louise Glück . . . Glück has long favored subjects of disharmony as a means to achieve a poetry of poise . . . Glück forces pain to take a bow in her poems.” ―David Biespiel, The Oregonian“Emerging from a reading of this accomplished collected works is like having run a rigorous marathon. While in shorter individual collections Louise Glück's consistency of tone has the effect of unifying her poems, in a much larger assemblage like this one, the boundaries of individual poems seem to dissolve and merge into what has the feel of one long, extended poem that is an invigorating but demanding read. Glück's voice is like no other in modern American poetry.” ―Rita Signorelli-Pappas, World Literature Today“Eleven previous collections are gathered here, echoing with synergistic reverberations, as Glück explores--with growing mastery and imagination, candor and