There is a certain amount of trust that must be given to artists – a willingness to follow them wherever their creativity takes them. From writing terse, exquisitely crafted poems, Louise Glück has entered the realm of the short story in verse form. It’s jarring, and not completely successful, but there are moments of bone-chilling clarity. For those moments alone, it’s worth the reader’s attention and commitment to her new poetic form.
The themes of the poems in A Village Life revolve around a fountain in a small, unspecified small town, although it feels like it may be somewhere near Averno, in Italy, the setting of her previous book. Poems concern the seasons, the necessity and unwillingness to accept the changes life inevitably presents, death, and uncertainty. Death, and our inability to accept it as part of life, is a major theme in many of the poems. From “A Slip of Paper” comes:
“To get born, your body makes a pact with death,/and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.”
During a panel discussion of poets, Glück said, “You have to believe that what you're doing as you're working has the makings of a miraculous utterance, you have to believe it. But if you continue to believe it, in the absence of evidence, if you begin to think that if nobody seems to like your poem it's because your poem is so harrowing and so violently perceptive that people are fleeing from it—that response needs to be examined.”
There are miraculous utterances in this collection of poems, and they are harrowing. And, if you find yourself fleeing from her poems by simply feeling the need to put them down for a time, the she’s achieved part of her goal as a poet.
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