You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferry boats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.
When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake's edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

from 'Vita Nova'

Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form of her own invention, the book-length sequence which combines worldly dramas and ecstatic utterance, a literal world and the worlds of legend and myth that impart meaning or irony to our ways of life, love and separation. Vita Nova exists in a long moment of spring, of deaths and beginnings. The verse is far-seeing, written in the elected shadow of Dante. Glück brings her subjects into sharp focus: the smallest human hopes in the light of the vast forces that shape and thwart them.