{"title":"Books by Louise Gluck","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781800172951","title":"Marigold and Rose","description":"\"Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.\" So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück's astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.   Here are the elements you'd expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. \"Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow.\" The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. \"It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know.\"Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205522620594,"sku":"9781800172951","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781800172951_c1af3c18-912b-4deb-90ce-05aa3d3e4c43.jpg?v=1786026785"},{"product_id":"9781857548372","title":"Averno","description":"Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020                              Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck’s new collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is both passageway between worlds and an impassable barrier. The book proceeds as a sequence, an extended lamentation, its long restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resolution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage and grief-stricken.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43399582220466,"sku":"9781857548372","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781857548372_7556175d-1aa0-4390-bbab-0183509b2073.jpg?v=1786029735"},{"product_id":"9781847770592","title":"A Village Life","description":"Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020                              From a fountain where 'all the roads in the village unite', concentric circles expand into the distance: the young and old, fields, a river, a mountain – the fountain's stone counterpart, where the roads end, human time superimposed on geological time. Renowned as a lyrical poet of austere intensity, in A Village Life Louise Glück evokes a Mediterranean world with luminous precision. Her focus is on moments of speculation and reflection in a dreamlike present tense.                  Cover image: Print by unknown artist, c. 1930, from the Robert O. Muller collection. Cover design: StephenRaw.com","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43399876837554,"sku":"9781847770592","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781847770592_61a2fb0d-4ffb-432f-bf9b-8cf84ee5dff6.jpg?v=1786029024"},{"product_id":"9780241526002","title":"Averno","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Brilliant poems of complex, haunting power... \u003ci\u003eAverno\u003c\/i\u003e may be Glück's masterpiece' \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn acclaimed collection from the Nobel prize-winning poet\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. Together, the poems of \u003ci\u003eAverno \u003c\/i\u003eswell to a staggeringly powerful lamentation, through which the reader glimpses the ecstasy of the inevitable, only to find it resisted by the insistent, impersonal presence of the Earth.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43600212525234,"sku":"9780241526002","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241526002_cc0b92a4-72ae-4397-b31d-3555b19d34c3.jpg?v=1786012390"},{"product_id":"9781857543919","title":"Meadowlands","description":"Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020                              Louise Glück interweaves in this book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's Odyssey. Myth and modern life have a lot to teach each other in terms of irony and clarification. Penelope, Circe, the son Telemachus and Odysseus himself emerge compellingly real and quite distinct from the dusty figures they sometimes seem to be. Glück's poems are by turns bracingly comic, expansive, tolerant and, finally, heartbreaking. The trivia of daily life break across underlying dramas which the dialogues disclose. Dream and actuality, choice and compulsion, collide. She also explores the notion of the nostos, the homecoming, source of the momentum of Homer's poem.                  'We look at the world once, in childhood.\/The rest is memory.'","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308108788085,"sku":"9781857543919","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781857543919_ee2bf6dc-88a6-400e-9441-622672eba8ac.jpg?v=1786029726"},{"product_id":"9781857543124","title":"The First Five Books of Poems","description":"Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020                              In an essay Louise Gluck says that every end of a book is for her a 'conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off', in which she discerns the themes, habits and preoccupations of the previous volume as defining the tasks of the next.                  The First Five Books of Poems shows the poet in the conscious evolution she describes, marking time in changes. Readers will hear specifics of sequence: where the ferocious tension of her first book moves towards the finely-spun lyricism of the second. The nouns of that book acquire more intimate weight and become the icons of her third collection, then rise to an archetypal, mythic scale in the fourth. These poems are as various as the force of Gluck's intelligence is constant. The austerely beautiful voice that has become Gluck's' keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.                  'She is a poet of enormous importance and intelligence,' wrote Bernard O'Donoghue in the Independent; 'we must not miss her.'               The First Five Books of Poems includes Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985) and Ararat (1990).","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308550369653,"sku":"9781857543124","price":18.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781857543124_44f0a436-2887-49e1-968d-06c311dfa9d5.jpg?v=1786029723"},{"product_id":"9781857544176","title":"Vita Nova","description":"Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020                              Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form of her own invention, the book-length sequence which combines worldly dramas and ecstatic utterance, a literal world and the worlds of legend and myth that impart meaning or irony to our ways of life, love and separation. Vita Nova exists in a long moment of spring, of deaths and beginnings. The verse is far-seeing, written in the elected shadow of Dante. Glück brings her subjects into sharp focus: the smallest human hopes in the light of the vast forces that shape and thwart them.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308550697333,"sku":"9781857544176","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781857544176_89695a8a-0f4c-4e84-ac75-70702e18e221.jpg?v=1786029727"},{"product_id":"9781857545425","title":"The Seven Ages","description":"Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020                              Loiuse Gluck has long practised 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 Gluck'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 defied and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up at the reader's spine.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308696777077,"sku":"9781857545425","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781857545425_fd92690e-9a5a-4919-b14b-8f885f03a8cd.jpg?v=1786034431"},{"product_id":"9781800171558","title":"American Originality","description":"The probing essays collected in American Originality scrutinise the terms we use to think about recent American poetry, its antecedents (not just Whitman and Dickinson but Ovid, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Keats) and its future, questioning how we distinguish between work that is unique and work that is original, carefully delineating the allure of both 'shared traditions' and 'the cult of illogic'. Attentive always to risk and danger, Louise Gluck illuminates how the poet at work moves between panic and gratitude, agony and resolution.   Essays on specific writers and on the larger themes of American literature introduce the terms by which she reads and celebrates ten younger poets whose work she has advocated. Studded with brilliant insights into her own practice and the work of her contemporaries, this is an essential book for any interested reader of new poetry.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312929255797,"sku":"9781800171558","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"faithful-and-virtuous-night-1","title":"Faithful and Virtuous Night","description":"Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020               Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection               Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize                              You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where 'on page three, a dog appeared. \/ On page five, there was a ball', and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, 'the dog float[ing] into sky to join the ball'. Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story, but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of it's narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57490209636725,"sku":"9781847774798","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781847774798.jpg?v=1786442093"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-louise-gluck.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}