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A Village Life (2009)

by Louise Glück(Favorite Author)

4 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0374283745 (ISBN13: 9780374283742)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: I tend to like narrative poems, so I like Gluck's attempt to create a village (or a village life) from her poems, crafting characters and stories in this book. I also like her reoccuring motifs, such as the bats or the burning leaves, that help tie the connection together. However, I thought some of her poems were more prose-like than poetic, which weakened them. The main complaint, though, that I had of this collection is that it didn't do what poetry should do, which is help us to see the ordinary in a new light. I thought she did a good job of helping the reader see what she was portraying, but there was nothing beyond that seeing.
review 2: The strength of this collection, for me, lies in the uniting theme: the village. It's outlines shift a bit from ... morepoem to poem, but there's a consistent, building sense of home (from "Midsummer": "You will leave the village where you were born/ and in another country you'll become very rich, very powerful,/ but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you/ can't say what it was,/ and eventually you will return to seek it.") less

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