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Vita Nova
Louise Glück
10% off
Categories: American, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (64 pages)
(Pub. May 2000)
9781857544176
£9.95 £8.96
- Description
- Excerpt
- Author
- Awards
- Reviews
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'
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'
Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020
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.
Awards won by Louise Glück
Short-listed, 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection (Faithful and Virtuous Night)
Short-listed, 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize (Faithful and Virtuous Night)
Winner, 1993 Pulitzer Prize (The Wild Iris)
Praise for Louise Glück
'Scraps of family intimacy float in, Gluck's touch sometimes so light it comes to us as a murmur in the ear...a brave book'
Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry
'Glück's prose is simultaneously condensed, so that any one sentence takes time to properly unfold in the mind, and closely interwoven, so that highlighting a single sentence feels like doing violence to the intricate arguments her sentences form together... American Originality is a provocation and delight for anyone who takes writing seriously... It is an essential work by an essential artist.'
Heather Cass White, Times Literary Supplement
'Glück's talent is for saying the thing that might not feel true until it is put into words, as though we were on the therapist's couch. But she doesn't counsel or patronize - she's right on the couch next to the reader, hearing the lesson... Louise Glück has written some of the most incantatory, sorrowful, wrenching lyrics in American poetry. Her work is not for readers who want to be coddled, but for those who can apprehend that psychological dissonance, difficult as it may be to endure, is evidence of life.'
Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Times Literary Supplement
'Glück's poems in this collection are quietly compelling as they suggest stories of sorrow and loss which are fundamental to our shared human existence.'
Kathleen Bell, The High Window
'Glück's skill is Orpheus-like: to travel to hellish depths and find a way back again. As we journey through such dark territories, we are grateful for her insight.'
Tanvi Roberts, Irish Times
Glucks first collection since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. Memories, absent voices and clocks speak of the passage of time, and of the loss and decay left in time's wake. Yet there is also acceptance, coping and - as the 'collective' of the title suggests - an invitation to those readers 'who will know what I mean'.
Maria Crawford, Financial Times Best Poetry Books of 2021
'Silence has been prominent in Glück's work for decades... The book is full of echoes of her earlier work, its winds (the breath of the void) and silence'
Elisa Gabbert, New York Times
'A slim volume of just 15 pieces, but like all the Nobel laureate's work, it punches above its apparent weight. Glück has always been a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that's really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage. It is a hallmark of late, great writing, as is the courage to go into the dark... We're back in the stylised, half-dreamed Glück landscapes that are rural equivalents of an Edward Hopper painting, and back with her astonishing poetry'
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
'These essays constitute long-form extensions of Gluck's own poetic concerns... people familiar with Glück's poetry will recognise this hallmark astringency and its attendant whiplash wit'
Dzifa Benson, The Poetry Review
'Gluck's essays are delicate, tactful, self-aware and wry; her sense of humour is so understated that you might miss it if you think of her solely as a poet of tenacity and autumnal smokiness... Reading American Originality alongside her first essay collection, Proofs and Theories (1994), a portrait emerges of a wilful, embattled child who earned her stern serenity not only through loss but also through that miraculous state of grace that poetry can provide'
Ange Mlinko, Literary Review
'In this collection of sharply focussed and insightful essays one unifying theme emerges. Despite all the fads and fashions, the dead ends and new waves of poetry one thing survives, and that as she so vividly reminds us, is poetry'
Roger Bloor, The Alchemy Spoon
'Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain.'
Washington Post 'Gluck stands at the centre of time and speaks, not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul.'
Partisan Review 'Characteristically sure-footed, Glück speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings.'
Publishers Weekly
Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry
'Glück's prose is simultaneously condensed, so that any one sentence takes time to properly unfold in the mind, and closely interwoven, so that highlighting a single sentence feels like doing violence to the intricate arguments her sentences form together... American Originality is a provocation and delight for anyone who takes writing seriously... It is an essential work by an essential artist.'
Heather Cass White, Times Literary Supplement
'Glück's talent is for saying the thing that might not feel true until it is put into words, as though we were on the therapist's couch. But she doesn't counsel or patronize - she's right on the couch next to the reader, hearing the lesson... Louise Glück has written some of the most incantatory, sorrowful, wrenching lyrics in American poetry. Her work is not for readers who want to be coddled, but for those who can apprehend that psychological dissonance, difficult as it may be to endure, is evidence of life.'
Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Times Literary Supplement
'Glück's poems in this collection are quietly compelling as they suggest stories of sorrow and loss which are fundamental to our shared human existence.'
Kathleen Bell, The High Window
'Glück's skill is Orpheus-like: to travel to hellish depths and find a way back again. As we journey through such dark territories, we are grateful for her insight.'
Tanvi Roberts, Irish Times
Glucks first collection since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. Memories, absent voices and clocks speak of the passage of time, and of the loss and decay left in time's wake. Yet there is also acceptance, coping and - as the 'collective' of the title suggests - an invitation to those readers 'who will know what I mean'.
Maria Crawford, Financial Times Best Poetry Books of 2021
'Silence has been prominent in Glück's work for decades... The book is full of echoes of her earlier work, its winds (the breath of the void) and silence'
Elisa Gabbert, New York Times
'A slim volume of just 15 pieces, but like all the Nobel laureate's work, it punches above its apparent weight. Glück has always been a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that's really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage. It is a hallmark of late, great writing, as is the courage to go into the dark... We're back in the stylised, half-dreamed Glück landscapes that are rural equivalents of an Edward Hopper painting, and back with her astonishing poetry'
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
'These essays constitute long-form extensions of Gluck's own poetic concerns... people familiar with Glück's poetry will recognise this hallmark astringency and its attendant whiplash wit'
Dzifa Benson, The Poetry Review
'Gluck's essays are delicate, tactful, self-aware and wry; her sense of humour is so understated that you might miss it if you think of her solely as a poet of tenacity and autumnal smokiness... Reading American Originality alongside her first essay collection, Proofs and Theories (1994), a portrait emerges of a wilful, embattled child who earned her stern serenity not only through loss but also through that miraculous state of grace that poetry can provide'
Ange Mlinko, Literary Review
'In this collection of sharply focussed and insightful essays one unifying theme emerges. Despite all the fads and fashions, the dead ends and new waves of poetry one thing survives, and that as she so vividly reminds us, is poetry'
Roger Bloor, The Alchemy Spoon
'Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain.'
Washington Post 'Gluck stands at the centre of time and speaks, not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul.'
Partisan Review 'Characteristically sure-footed, Glück speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings.'
Publishers Weekly
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