"Though it resembles her others least, A Village Life may come to be seen as Glück's most beautiful and moving book so far . . . [It] shows a ripening of Glück's genius, her mastery for depicting the things of this earth . . . [and] can be seen as the work of a master poet who has done what many poets long to do: she has written about death immortally." –Adam Fitzgerald, Rain Taxi
"
A Village Life magnificently extends the landscapes, the harmonics, and the dramatis personae of
Averno . . . More than any of Glück's previous volumes,
A Village Life has a generous heart, a large spiritual scope in which to imagine the lives of others." –
Rosanna Warren, The New Republic "Not many poets can be electrifying while keeping the stakes this hypothermically low. Glück is a master, finely calibrating the shocks and their intervals. This collection, her 11th, is frightening the way a living statue would be frightening if it were to smile at you." –
Dana Goodyear, Los Angeles Times "Here is a poet at the unmistakable peak of her expressive power and experience . . . The characters in
A Village Life do what the voice tells them. 'It says forget, you forget. / It says begin again, you begin again.' Louise Glück begins again, unforgettably, in this profound new collection of poems." –
Carol Muske-Dukes, Huffington Post "This 11th book of verse by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück offers beautiful language with a sense of loss and disappointment . . . The poems in
A Village Life combine the intensity of her early work and the longer lines and insight of more recent books. The writing is often hauntingly beautiful . . . There are stanzas where Glück makes her landscape seem so radiant or exquisite that you don't want to turn the page." –
Elizabeth Lund, Christian Science Monitor "Like Cavafy's persona pieces, the real subject of these poems is often a particular mood, not the transmission of details that distinguish, say, a child's voice from a farmer's . . . Glück lets us hear the silence that follows in the confessional. In my favorite poems in
A Village Life, she also shows us what one who has heard that silence can now say." –
Zach Savich, Kenyon Review "Louise Glück is one of America's most famous poets, and one of the best . . . The fictions here are really a pretext for Glück to stage poems that explore, for the first time, material that is neither explicitly her own biography nor that of her mythical stand-ins. Always at the mercy of the Greek gods that inspired her earlier poems, Glück now is playing God herself." –
Morgan Teicher, Cleveland Plain Dealer
