Best Selling Books by Louise Gluck

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The First Four Books of Poems collects the early work that established Louise Gluck as one of America''s most original and important poets. Honored with the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, Gluck was celebrated early in her career for her fierce, austerely beautiful voice. In Firstborn, The House on Marshland, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, we see the conscious progression of a poet who speaks with blade-like accuracy and stirring depth. The voice that has become Gluck''s trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Always she is moving in and around the achingly real, writing poems adamant in their accuracy and depth. Their progression is proof of her commitment to change; with her first four books of poetry collected in a single volume, Louise Gluck shows herself happily "used by time."

Winner of the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, Proofs and Theories is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise Glück, whose most recent book of poems, The Wild Iris, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Glück brings to her prose the same precision of language, the same incisiveness and insight that distinguish her poetry. The force of her thought is evident everywhere in these essays, from her explorations of other poets'' work to her skeptical contemplation of current literary critical notions such as "sincerety" and "courage." Here also are Glück''s revealing reflections on her own education and life as a poet, and a tribute to her teacher and mentor, Stanley Kunitz. Proofs and Theories is the testament of a major poet.

This collection of stunningly beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck''s poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature In an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided Odysseus, and a shrewd adolescent Telemachus. Through these classical figures, Meadowlands explores such timeless themes as the endless negotiation of family life, the cruelty that intimacy enables, and the frustrating trivia of the everyday. Gluck discovers in contemporary life the same quandary that lies at the heart of The Odyssey: the "unanswerable/affliction of the human heart: how to divide/the world''s beauty into acceptable/and unacceptable loves."

Louise GlÜck has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle''s metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal, and crude. The Seven Ages is GlÜck''s ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible -- an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader''s spine.

Since, 1990, Louise GlÜck has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova -- like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence -- combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring, a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope, brutal, luminous, and farseeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, GlÜck compasses the essential human paradox, a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it.

An anthology of contemporary poets presents works that reflect the diversity in American poetry.

The dazzling new collection from the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Louise Glück''s work consistently draws on her own experience, looking for the common threads in it that render it universal. Her poems are not confessional, they are mythic. In Winter Recipes from the Collective, she starts with the dying and death of a near relation to create an indelible group of characters who act in poems that touch on the family romance, loss, art, and immortality. Her poems are so powerful because her portrayal of experience reminds us so trenchantly of what we recognize we too have seen and felt.

A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck''s sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father''s hollow life and her mother''s inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter''s belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-strong, deeply felt lyrics are steeled by love and understanding.

Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics is a quarterly of essays and poetry from some of the world''s most celebrated independent thinkers, leading artists, and up-and-coming literary voices.

Louise Elisabeth Glück is an American poet and essayist. She has won numerous major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bollingen Prize. In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. This book contains a complete collection of Glick''s two poems Averno and Village Life; in addition, there are also a selection of five early poems.