Poems 1962-2012

"Ms. Glück's new and career-spanning Poems 1962-2012 is a major event in this country's literature, perhaps this year's most major . . . Put together, these compact volumes have a great novel's cohesiveness and raking moral intensity. They display a supple and prosecutorial mind interrogating not merely her own life but also the sensual and political nature of the world that spins around it." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Glück's Poems 1962-2012 is a big book by a poet who values, above all, intensity of address, leanness of sentiment, and precision of speech . . . [She is] among the most moving poets of our era . . . Glück's innovation, in her best early poems, was to borrow the coolest American style and apply it to the hottest material: she was an objectivist of the emotions . . . This voice is not going to go away." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"Glück's latest volume . . . reminds us that she has been not only a resourceful and versatile poet but also an astonishingly brave one. Brave in what sense? In the way she has steadily enlarged her range and idiom, working, to be sure, within the compass of her own nature, but ever testing the limits of her gift, so that the impression made by the work as a whole is not of limitation but of an overwhelming fullness of invention and abundance of life." --Robert Boyers, The Nation

"Glück is as important and influential a poet as we have in America . . . Glück's work is all edges . . . the sharper ones can inflict heavenly hurt, where the meanings are. If you want to know about the last half-century of American poetry, you need to read these poems." --Michael Robbins, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Since 1962 few American poets have succeeded as well in writing as a poet of poise as Louise Glück . . . Glück has long favored subjects of disharmony as a means to achieve a poetry of poise . . . Glück forces pain to take a bow in her poems." --David Biespiel, The Oregonian

"Emerging from a reading of this accomplished collected works is like having run a rigorous marathon. While in shorter individual collections Louise Glück's consistency of tone has the effect of unifying her poems, in a much larger assemblage like this one, the boundaries of individual poems seem to dissolve and merge into what has the feel of one long, extended poem that is an invigorating but demanding read. Glück's voice is like no other in modern American poetry." --Rita Signorelli-Pappas, World Literature Today

"Eleven previous collections are gathered here, echoing with synergistic reverberations, as Glück explores--with growing mastery and imagination, candor and wide-ranging inquiry, intensity and restraint--the turmoil of family life; the fever, bliss, and misery of lust and love; the circular battle with the self; age and death. For 50 years, Glück, a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer winner, has been writing poems of formal elegance, psychic intimacy, brainy fusion, emotional acuity, and aesthetic splendor. As intimate and immediate as her lyrics are, Glück is also vatic, summoning the old gods and the timeless myths to trace the human stream of consciousness, experience, and dream." --Booklist

"Though Glück has held national fame since the late 1970s for her terse, pared-down poems, this first career-spanning collected may be the most widely noted, and the most praised, collected poems in some time. Here is the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992), whose talking flowers encapsulated birth, death, loss, and hope; here are the starkly framed family memories of her controversial Ararat (1990), and the careful, self-accusing humor of late work such as The Seven Ages (2001). Here, too, are the stormy, almost overexposed poems (reminiscent of Robert Lowell) with which she began, and the calmly uncompromising universals of A Village Life (2009), where 'the mountain stands like a beacon, to remind the night that the earth exists.'" --Publishers Weekly (starred review)