Seven Ages

Louise Gluck was Vermonts third State Poet. Born in New York City, she grew up on Long Island. Her works have won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award, and won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She has also received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Glk teaches at Williams College. From her poem Vespers: Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree. / Here, in Vermont, country / of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived, / it would mean you existed.

Louise GlÜck has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal, and crude. The Seven Ages is GlÜck's ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible -- an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader's spine.

Louise GlÜck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993. The author of eight books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She was named the next U.S. poet laureate in August 2003. Her most recent book is The Seven Ages. Louise GlÜck teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Distributor: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: 03-26-2002
Pages: 80
Measurements: 9in X 6in X 0.2in X 4.16oz