Review by Booklist Review
In her first new collection since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, Glück returns to themes of mortality and nature; she also addresses ageing. In "The Denial of Death," a concierge, a spectral gentleman, addresses the abandoned narrator, "Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey, / not into the world, like your friend's, but into yourself and your memories." Glück's work builds on an inquiring sense of wonder over our human experience and fortitude. If not for her tender, sometimes funny lines, one might mistake her for a pessimist. In "Night Thoughts," she images herself as an infant, "Was I a good baby? A / bad?" Thinking of the adults that were there then, "How hard it was / to be alive, no wonder / they all died." Glück's wryness is grounded in the common actuality of being. In "Song," the poet muses on a potter, "Leo thinks that things man makes / are more beautiful / than what exists in nature," to which her reply is, "and I say no. / And Leo says / wait and see." The Nobel committee praised the "austere beauty" of Glück's poems; this marvelous collection adds warmth and wit.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Everything is change," Glück (Faithful and Virtuous Night) writes early in her quiet but powerful first work since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. An overarching philosophy--"Also everything returns, but what returns is not/what went away"--drives the collection, with Glück's speaker standing at the precipice of great change, as though facing a coming winter. Glück considers a primary human loneliness in humane, reflective poems that are deeply engaged with the idea of being alone with oneself: "There is no one alive anymore/ who remembers me as a baby," Glück mourns. But as she looks back on her life----hard work, loss, some joy----she also looks forward. Not toward an afterlife, necessarily, but toward a place of peace: a "house in the distance, smoke is coming from its chimney." Death, these poems purport, is inevitable, but one need not be afraid: "All hope is lost," she claims; "We must return to where it was lost/ if we want to find it again." With this magnificent collection, a great poet delivers a treatise on how to live and die. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Bidart, whose multiple awards include a Pulitzer, tops off five decades of writing with a book arguing Against Silence in its embrace of the world.
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