Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature In Vita Nova, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to the poet, Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova--like its immediate predecessors, a booklength sequence--combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring: a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope; brutal, luminous, and far-seeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Glück compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that thwart and shape it. Here, classical myth collides with modern feeling. A Modern Mythology: The timeless grief of Orpheus and the defiance of Dido are re-examined through a startlingly contemporary lens. - Poems of Love and Loss: A book-length sequence that follows the arc of a relationship’s end and the difficult, luminous spring that follows. - The Paradox of Hope: Glück’s unmistakable voice confronts the essential human paradox—finding a “new life” in the very moments of death and resignation. - Austere Beauty: Each poem is a masterclass in precision and form, where ecstatic utterance meets worldly drama in a style that is Glück’s alone. "The book exists at the vanishing point of light. What's left is not darkness, but the amniotic of soul, and hence the title, Vita Nova , new life." - BookForum Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for  The Wild Iris , the National Book Award for  Faithful and Virtuous Night , the National Book Critics Circle Award for  The Triumph of Achilles , the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for  Poems 1962–2012 , and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vita Nova By Gluck, Louise Ecco Copyright © 2004 Louise Gluck All right reserved. ISBN: 0060957956 Vita Nova You saved me, you should remember me. The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. I remember sounds like that from my childhood, laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, something like that. Lugano. Tables under the apple trees. Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags. And by the lake's edge, a young man throws his hat into the water; perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him. Crucial sounds or gestures like a track laid down before the larger themes and then unused, buried. Islands in the distance. My mother holding out a plate of little cakes-- as far as I remember, changed in no detail, the moment vivid, intact, having never been exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age hungry for life, utterly confident-- By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green pieced into the dark existing ground. Surely spring has been returned to me, this time not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly. Continues... Excerpted from Vita Nova by Gluck, Louise Copyright © 2004 by Louise Gluck. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.