num_pages: 80
description: The Seven Ages was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1999.The fierce, austerely beautiful, and visionary voice that has become Glück's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Many of the poems in this collection bear the familiar features of Glück's earlier work, returning to themes of nature and the classical narratives that explain the phenomena of the world around us. Like Ararat, Glück's fifth book, this collection explores the hazards and pleasures of the domestic sphere and the family with an eye to the demonic. As in The Wild Iris, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and Vita Nova, imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition in these poems. Unlike her past work, many of these poems inhabit the realm of dreams, moving backward in time to an eidetic, unrecoverable past and ahead to an as-yet unrealized future. "Earth was given to me in a dream/ In a dream I possessed it." In these poems, Glück is wry, dreamlike, idiomatic, undeceived, unrelenting. This new transparent mode, although charged by the indelible imagery and exact phrasing her readers will recognize, represents an ecstatic departure from her previous work.
language: English
title: The Seven Ages
titlecomplete: The Seven Ages
genres: American, 21st Century, Literary Fiction, Womens, Poetry, The United States Of America, Nonfiction, Poetry Plays
ratings_count: 1241
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Poetry, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Massachusetts Book Award
category: Poetry, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Poetry
publisher: Ecco