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    A Village Life: Poems
    A Village Life: Poems
    A Village Life: Poems
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    A Village Life: Poems

    By Louise Glück

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    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

    A dreamlike collection from the Nobel Prize-winning poet

    A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:

    All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.

    Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—

    The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;

    on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.

    —from "tributaries"

    Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.

    Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 8, 2014
    ISBN9781466875630
    A Village Life: Poems
    Author

    Louise Glück

    Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for A Village Life

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I approached this work with cautious optimism. While I do enjoy poetry, I have struggled to enjoy modern pieces. This was a delightful surprise and a worthwhile read. The work is not perfect and some of the poems are short, lacking any ground breaking visual concepts; however, there are poems and moments in this selection, that really show the author's talents. If you happen to come across her work in passing, I would recommend stopping to take a second look. It is marose at times but also insightful. The majority of the works deal with our acceptance of death but also has pieces that reflect on friendship and love. It is a matured perspective on the facets of life, which many will be able to relate.
    • 4/5
      The poems are beautiful, but also a bit bleak and melancholy.
    • 4/5
      Louise Gluck won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, and she has also won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, Bollingen Prize, the National Humanities Medal, and more. She was the US Poet Laureate in 2003-2004. I had heard of her before, but not read any of her work.This collection revolves around an agricultural village. It feels very nineteenth-early twentieth century. The book flap says it is Mediterranean, but it was not obvious to me.The poems all focus on the cycle of life (plant and human)--the seasons, crops, the town square with fountain and young people flirting, children, parents, the healing sun, and so on.My favorites: Tributaries and A Warm DayLeast favorite: Harvest, which has the line "Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants./Pumpkins, lots of pumpkins./Gourds, ropes pf dried chilies, braids of garlic." Speak for yourself, but pumpkins, dried chilies, and braids of garlic are awesome. I've already baked a pumpkin this year!

    Book preview

    A Village Life - Louise Glück

    TWILIGHT

    All day he works at his cousin’s mill,

    so when he gets home at night, he always sits at this one window,

    sees one time of day, twilight.

    There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.

    It’s as his cousin says:

    Living—living takes you away from sitting.

    In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape

    representing the world. The seasons change,

    each visible only a few hours a day.

    Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness—

    abstractions from which come intense pleasures,

    like the figs on the table.

    At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.

    It goes down late in summer—sometimes it’s hard to stay awake.

    Then everything falls away.

    The world for a little longer

    is something to see, then only something to hear,

    crickets, cicadas.

    Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.

    Then sleep takes this away also.

    But it’s easy to give things up like this, experimentally,

    for a matter of hours.

    I open my fingers—

    I let everything go.

    Visual world, language,

    rustling of leaves in the night,

    smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.

    I let it go, then I light the candle.

    PASTORAL

    The sun rises over the mountain.

    Sometimes there’s mist

    but the sun’s behind it always

    and the mist isn’t equal to it.

    The sun burns its way through,

    like the mind defeating stupidity.

    When the mist clears, you see the meadow.

    No one really understands

    the savagery of this place,

    the way it kills people for no reason,

    just to keep in practice.

    So people flee—and for a while, away from here,

    they’re exuberant, surrounded by so many choices—

    But no signal from earth

    will ever reach the sun. Thrash

    against that fact, you are lost.

    When they come back, they’re worse.

    They think they failed in the city,

    not that the city doesn’t make good its promises.

    They blame their upbringing: youth ended and they’re back,

    silent, like their fathers.

    Sundays, in summer, they lean against the wall of the clinic,

    smoking cigarettes. When they remember,

    they pick flowers for their girlfriends—

    It makes the girls happy.

    They think it’s pretty here, but they miss the city, the afternoons

    filled with shopping and talking, what you do

    when you have no money …

    To my mind, you’re better off if you stay;

    that way, dreams don’t damage you.

    At dusk, you sit by the window. Wherever you live,

    you can see the fields, the river, realities

    on which you cannot impose yourself—

    To me, it’s safe. The sun rises; the mist

    dissipates to reveal

    the immense mountain. You can see the peak,

    how white it is, even in summer. And the sky’s so

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