Vita Nova

Louise Gluck's collection is a work of ends and beginnings. Her poetry comes in white-hot sequences of passionate intensity. "Vita Nova" is a sequence of poems which dramatises the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new life. Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form of her own invention, the book-length sequence which combines worldly dramas and ecstatic utterance, a literal world and the worlds of legend and myth that impart meaning or irony to our ways of life, love and separation. Vita Nova exists in a long moment of spring, of deaths and beginnings. The verse is far-seeing, written in the elected shadow of Dante. Glück brings her subjects into sharp focus: the smallest human hopes in the light of the vast forces that shape and thwart them.