Works by
Louise Glück
(Aka Louise Elisabeth Glück)
(Poet)
[April 22, 1943 - ]

As Editor

• The Best American Poetry 1993 (1993), David Lehman and Louise Glück, eds.

Non-fiction

• Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994)

Poetry

• A Village Life (September 1, 2009)

• Averno (2006)
  Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück’s tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present.

• The Seven Ages (2001)
  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.

• Vita Nova (1999)
  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.

• Meadowlands (1997)
  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."

• The First Four Books of Poems (1995)
  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 WildIris, Gluck was celebrated early in her career for her fierce, austerely beautiful voice. InFirstborn, The House on MarshlandWand, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles, which wonthe National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, we see the conscious progression of apoet who speaks with blade-like accuracy and stirring depth.

• Mock Orange (1993)

• The Wild Iris (1992) -- Winner 1993 Pulitzer Prize; Finalist 1992 National Book Award Winner
  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.

• Ararat (1990)

• The Triumph of Achilles (1985)

• Descending Figure (1980)

• The Garden (1976)

• The House on Marshland (1975)

• Firstborn (1968)

See also:

• Biography - Louise Elisabeth Gluck (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML

• The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction (2006) by Daniel Morris

• On Louise Gluck: Change What You See (2005) by Joanne Diehl

• Louise Gluck's "The Mystery": A Study Guide from Gale's "Poetry for Students" (Volume 15, Chapter 10, 2003)
  Digital - PDF

• The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck (1992) by Elizabeth Dodd