Critical Consensus for 9/1: A Village Life: Poems by Louise Gluck
Louise Gluck's poems are as happy-go-lucky as this photo
Published poetry collections are rare these days, and even rarer is a book of poems that gets reviewed by both the Los Angeles and New York Times on the same day. Louise Gluck, who William Logan of the New York Times calls “perhaps the most popular literary poet in America,” is back with a collection of poems that breaks with the minimalism she is known for. In A Village Life (out today), each poem depicts an element of the same unnamed village, creating a collection of telling snapshots. These snapshots, however, are not the kind you hang on your living room wall. Their dark corners and evocations of death demonstrate why Logan refers to Gluck as “our great poet of annihilation and disgust, our demigoddess of depression.” While the poems in A Village Life will still make you shiver, some critics are saying Gluck’s change to longer, more narrative lines are not as effective as the adjective-free, sparce poetry she is known for. See below for full reviews and excerpts.
“Not many poets can be electrifying while keeping the stakes this hypothermically low. Glück is a master, finely calibrating the shocks and their intervals.” - Dana Goodyear, Los Angeles Times
“Without the energies of her short lines and sharply drawn moods, she turns out to have an imagination almost as conventional as anyone else’s.” - William Logan, New York Times
“Instead of presenting an insightful portrait brimming with irony à la Masters, Glück’s poetry seems more like a quick sketch.” - Diane Scharper, Library Journal
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