The Seven Ages

The Seven Ages was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1999.The fierce, austerely beautiful, and visionary voice that has become Glück's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Many of the poems in this collection bear the familiar features of Glück'searlier work, returning to themes of nature and the classical narrativesthat explain the phenomena of the world around us. Like Ararat, Glück'sfifth book, this collection explores the hazards and pleasures of thedomestic sphere and the family with an eye to the demonic. As in The WildIris, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and Vita Nova, imaginationsupplants both empiricism and tradition in these poems. Unlike her pastwork, many of these poems inhabit the realm of dreams, moving backward intime to an eidetic, unrecoverable past and ahead to an as-yet unrealizedfuture. "Earth was given to me in a dream/ In a dream I possessed it." Inthese poems, Glück is wry, dreamlike, idiomatic, undeceived, unrelenting.This new transparent mode, although charged by the indelible imagery andexact phrasing her readers will recognize, represents an ecstatic departurefrom her previous work.