amiewhittemore 's review for:

A Village Life: Poems by Louise Glück
4.0

This was a second or third reread. As with any Gluck collection, there are moments of piercing insight. This book seems most preoccupied with what makes a life--particularly the departures within it, the way we settle into our choices and their limitations. There's a despair in this collection, but also a kind of low hum of....I wouldn't go so far as joy. But the leaves keep burning. And there's something there, in that transformation, in the way a fire is destruction and creation at once.