Gluck, Louise

Vita Nova

Hopewell, NJ: ECCO Press, 1999. First Printing. Hardcover. “Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova – like its immediate predecessors, a booklength sequence – combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring: a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope; brutal, luminous, and farseeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Glück compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it.” (From front flap) Louise Gluck (1943-2023) the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, was one of the most decorated contemporary American poets: she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, a National Humanities Medal, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and many more. She was one of the most gifted writers in the canon of American literature, known for her poetry’s technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into isolation, familial complexities, divorce, and death. The aforementioned Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.” The citation for her 2020 Nobel Prize states her being honored "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” This piece includes 32 largely shortform poems. From the collection of Laurence Goldstein (1943-2023), poet, editor, and professor in the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature. Hardcover in unclipped dustjacket. First Edition as stated at copyright page; First Printing, as indicated by number sequence thereon. Book in Very Fine condition with no noticeable defects inside or out, save for light age-toning to page leaves. Dustjacket Fine-Very Fine with light rubbing & scratching to front, back covers & spine; some tiny bumps & creases to edges & corners of same. A blank strip-sticker is affixed to barcode at lower left of back cover. Very Fine / Fine-Very Fine. [Item #8509]

Price: $80.00