num_pages: 80
description: A Village Life Louise Glck'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 TreesThe fountain rises at the center of the plaza;on sunny days rainbows in the piss of the cherub.from tributariesAround 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.Glck 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 in novels rather than poetry as Langdon Hammer has written of her long linesexpansive fluent and fullmanifesting a calm omniscience. While Glck's manner is novelistic she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals moments of suspension (rather than suspense) in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.
language: English
title: A Village Life
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux