Vita Nova

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.

Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Gluck has been exploring a form that is, according to 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 farseeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Gluck compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Gluck 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.

"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