A Village Life

✍ Scribed by Glück, Louise

• Book ID: 109511465
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 88 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781466875630

✦ Synopsis

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...