A Village Life: Poems
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Gluck, Louise / Gl Ck, Louise / Gl Ck, PUBLISHER: Farrar Straus Giroux, ""A Village Life," Louise Gluck'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. Gluck 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 Gluck'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."