WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet It 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.
