| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780060957957 | | Publisher: Ecco Press | | Publish Date: 3/1/2001 | | Buy.com Sku: 30679730 | | Item#: RGF6Q2 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9H x 5.75L x 0.25T | | Pages: 64 |
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| | | Since, 1990, Louise GlUck 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, GlUck 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.
Annotation:
Among other things, Glck weaves together the myth of Orpheus and Euridice and the history of her own unhappily-ended marriage. Like many of her books, VITA NOVA is primarily a long sequence of poems, meant to be taken together rather than as independent, freestanding lyrics. This book was nominated for the National Book Award in 1999.
| PraiseBook
"There is something blinding and granite-like about these beautiful, quiet poems." - Stephen Whited July/August 1999Boston Review
"Better than any poet since Plath, Gluck has perfected a kind of poem that reads as though written posthumously, but never fails to acknowledge 'the deepest human wish,' that of survival. She has inherited Rilke's genius for apprehending paradox." - Michael Tyrell December 1999/January 2000 Missouri Review
"In VITA NOVA, Louise Gluck ventures openly and gleefully into self-parody....[W]hat I like best about VITA NOVA is that Gluck whose work has always been sharp and witty, for the first time invites us in on the joke--all the jokes, in fact." - Marta Boswell 1999 Kenyon Review
"[Gluck] presents us with a narrator stretched to the point of breaking. The difficult persona of these poems produces an intimacy as foreboding as it is inviting, showing this poet at her most exposed and her most aggressive...." - Brian Henry Winter 2001 Times Literary Supplement
"[T]his is a strange, haunting volume, which shimmers on the edge of understanding, like a dream from which, as Louise Gluck claims, 'you'll wake up/ in a different world.'" - Josephine Balmer 05/25/2001 |
| Author Bio| Louise Gluck | | The poet Louise Gluck won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection THE WILD IRIS. She is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, and has spent many years teaching at Williams College. |
| Awards |
National Book Award (1999) |  | nominated, Poetry | | |
| | Read A Chapter | Vita NovaYou saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the
ferryboats.
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.
Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes
Click to read more... Vita NovaYou saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the
ferryboats.
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.
Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes
and then unused, buried.
Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes--
as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident--
By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.
Continues...
Excerpted from Vita Nova by Gluck, Louise Copyright © 2004 by Louise Gluck. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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