A Village Life

Starred review from September 21, 2009
Pulitzer Prize–winner Glück's 11th collection is set in an unidentified rural hill town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Less narrative than it is impressionistic, the book takes its undulating shape from natural cycles—the obvious but nonetheless awesome impact of days and seasons changing. Glück has shown herself to be an astute, heartbreaking and often funny observer of everyday violence. In poems like “At the River” and “Marriage,” she tracks life's messy movement from innocence and curiosity through lust, loss, anger and resignation. However, the relationships she studies are as much to the land—with its single, looming mountain, worked fields and increasingly dried-up river—as between individuals. Glück's achievement in this collection is to show, through the exigencies of the place she has chosen, how interpersonal relationships are formed, shaped and broken by the particular landscape in which they unfurl. Though the poems are intimate and deeply sympathetic, there remains the suggestion of a distance between Glück and the village life she writes about. When she declaims, “No one really understands/ the savagery of this place,” it feels as though she is speaking less about her chosen subjects than about herself.

August 15, 2009
What makes a great poem? Voice, as former U.S. poet laureate Glück said in "Proofs & Theories", her 1994 essay collection; poems will not survive on content alone. "The Wild Iris", which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and established Glück as a poet to be reckoned with, offers a telling example of the mesmerizing power of voice. Unfortunately, only a few of the poems in this 11th collection could be called mesmerizing. Written from the outside looking in, the poems concern love, courtship, sexual liaisons, birth, and death as experienced by ordinary inhabitants of a nameless village, as well as the earthworms, bats, dogs, and mice that co-inhabit the place. A first-person narrator holds the poems together and gives the collection its somewhat bleak focus. VERDICT Readers will be reminded of Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology", especially as the poet notes the underlying "savagery of this place, / the way it kills people for no reason." But instead of presenting an insightful portrait brimming with irony à la Masters, Glück's poetry seems more like a quick sketch. Recommended for those who read poetry extensively.Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2009
Always philosophical, occasionally haunted, poet Glck often entwines personal memories and experiences with gleanings from the myths of ancient Greece. In her eleventh collection, however, a work of organic coherence and symphonic intensity, she fully enters the archetypal realm to conjure a timeless sense of life as manifest in a Mediterranean village seen through the eyes of men and women young and old. A fountain is a central meeting place and a symbol of life. The earth is alive as plants change shape and color, bats wing about, the sky empties and fills, and the villagers spiral from contentment to sorrow, passion to detachment. The village is a prison, a theater, a sanctuary. Life is bountiful, death is dominant. Glcks rendering of the stages of human life, from animal innocence to the firing of the self to the slow banking down of age are breathtakingly exact and unsparing, yet gloriously mysterious. By writing of human consciousness as a force of nature like sunlight and wind, Glck articulates lifes camouflaged wholeness and sublime intricacy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)