The collected works of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer explores her transfigured landscapes and offers insight into her unique form created to reflect the human drive to release the past in order to realize the yet-unimagined

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.

'Brilliant poems of complex, haunting power... Averno may be Glück's masterpiece' The New York Times Book Review An acclaimed collection from the Nobel prize-winning poet This startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. Together, the poems of Averno swell to a staggeringly powerful lamentation, through which the reader glimpses the ecstasy of the inevitable, only to find it resisted by the insistent, impersonal presence of the Earth.

"A new edition of the Nobel laureate's searing sixth collection of poetry, about "the myth of a happy family" (The New York Review of Books)"-- Provided by publisher.

Louise Glück interweaves in this book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's Odyssey. Myth and modern life have a lot to teach each other in terms of irony and clarification. Penelope, Circe, the son Telemachus and Odysseus himself emerge compellingly real and quite distinct from the dusty figures they sometimes seem to be. Glück's poems are by turns bracingly comic, expansive, tolerant and, finally, heartbreaking. The trivia of daily life break across underlying dramas which the dialogues disclose. Dream and actuality, choice and compulsion, collide. She also explores the notion of the nostos, the homecoming, source of the momentum of Homer's poem. 'We look at the world once, in childhood./The rest is memory.'

Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel laureate Louise Glück. “Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose , Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis , an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. “Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow.” The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. “It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know.” Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.

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.

"Proofs & Theories is a long-awaited first gathering of essays by one of this country's most brilliant poets. Like her poems, the prose of Ms. Gluck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for The Wild Iris, is compressed, fastidious, fierce, alert, and absolutely unconsoled. The force of her thought is apparent everywhere in her writing and whether she is contemplating - skeptically - the critical currency of ideas like "courage" and "sincerity," T.S. Eliot's reduced reputation as a poet of impersonality, the loyalties of the objectivist George Oppen, or the ferocity in the headlong art of Sylvia Plath, there is something exhilarating about her seriousness, spare, austere, mind-clearing, and adamantly alive. She shares her skepticism with a whole temper of post-modern critical thought. But post-modernism, on the whole, has stood aside from what artists have thought was at stake in their art in order to dissect it. Ms. Gluck is also quite expert - wry sometimes, darkly funny even - at dissection but in these essays one never doubts what is at stake: an art as truthful, adamant, and unflinching as the intelligence that she brings to her own. Proofs & Theories is not a casual collection. It is the testament of a major poet"--OCLC

Images of life and spiritual growth center around the themes of the garden, the mirror, and lamentations in this collection of twenty-six poems

Louise Gluck 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 Gluck'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.