FIVE IN ONE

Louise Gluck's The First Five Books of Poems shows her conscious evolution as a poet, marking time in changes. Her austerely beautiful voice speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness, and she is a poet of enormous importance and intelligence.

Format: Book
Length: 244 pages
Publication date: 09 May 2022
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd

Louise Gluck, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020, views each book's conclusion as a deliberate diagnostic act, a commitment to avoid repeating the same themes, habits, and preoccupations of the previous volume. The First Five Books of Poems exemplifies this conscious evolution, marking time through changes. Readers will notice specific sequence details, such as how the intense tension of her first book transitions into the finely-spun lyricism of the second. The nouns in that book gain more intimate weight and become the icons of her third collection, then ascend to an archetypal, mythic scale in the fourth. These poems are as diverse as Gluck's intelligence is constant. The austerely beautiful voice that has become Gluck's keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Bernard O'Donoghue, writing in the Independent, emphasized the importance of Gluck's work, stating, "We must not miss her." The First Five Books of Poems includes her early collections, including Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), and Ararat (1990).

Weight: 356g
Dimension: 137 x 216 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781857543124