Poems 1962-2012

I love this collection of poetry. Definitely my favorite!

This is a nice, fat book on good paper stock, with legible fonts, good for poetry fans or introductory college courses. A substantial book for a substantial poet.

I have not been much of reader of poetry but I have in recent years I have made an effort to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the form. Consequently when Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize, I felt I should read some of her poetry and bought this large compilation of fifty years of her work. However I did not get around to actually reading it until a couple of months ago. The timing was somewhat ironic as Glück died just a few days after I started, a fact which helped keep me going although I don’t think I would have needed any prodding. I found I simply loved reading her poetry.My enjoyment may be enhanced by Glück’s refusal to use any standard poetic conventions: meter, rhyme, structure, etc. Moreover, I have to admit I do not fully understand much of her writing. But the mood and music of her work, even if often melancholy or tragic, speaks to me and I am extraordinarily glad I read this.

Most of her poems begin and end beautifully, but in the middle she wanders. The lines become vague or obscure. It wasn't always clear how the middle sections connected with the rest of the poem.

I am reading a few of Gluck's poems each day. They are amazing in their astute simplicity. And they provide a running commentary on life across decades -- an autobiography sublime.

It was a spectacular day for poetry and especially American poetry and even more so for American women poets when the Nobel prize was given to Louise Gluck. It is a rare honor to be so acknowledged but Gluck (pronounced Glick) has been well thought of by other poets for decades as a technically brilliant, understated but powerfully visionary writer whose work plays on the subconscious of the reader without them being aware of it. This book, in particular, is a compendium of 50 years of her poetry. If you are not familiar with her work and want to read what all the buzz is about, this is a good place to start.

Louise Gluck is an amazing poet, so worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. So much has been said about her, I'll just say that this volume is a great one-stop collection of her poetry up to 2012, and I am currently reading a few at a time, trying to savor them and let them sink in. The printed volume itself is nice quality though the printing is light and the font is small which puts a strain on my 62 year old eyes if I read too much. I long for the days when print was dark and fonts were large, or maybe I was just younger...

Just received her book, Poems 1962-2012, opened it to a random page, again and again, reading for the first time her work, her poems, her feelings and pain and fell in love with her. I can’t wait to read more.

Huge volume of this Nobel prize winning poet’s prose from 1962 to 2012. Great find!

Quería leer a esta autora y este libro está muy bien en tanto que es su poesía completa (hasta ahora).

Loise Gluck must be one of the most melancholic poets around, in league with the depressive and suicidal Silvia Plath. The poems are complicated and the voices are often unclear. One cannot decipher who's speaking to whom most of the time. Robert Boyers of "The Nation" writes on the back cover of this volume: "she ventures in and out of (lucidity) as if full comprehensibility were a chimera and an obstacle to true understanding!" The mood in many of the works is one of almost constant sadness, regret, bitterness, mental violence, dispair, loneliness, refusal to cooperate, victimization, rejection, etc. One wonders why POETRY could not help bring this sad woman up to a higher level of realization of the beauty and joy of living and of the grandeur and benevolence and blessedness of the universe and of human life in general . After reading almost half of the poems in this volume I was repulsed at her mental set and felt that the poetess had not reached the heights of Parnanus nor the Divine even though the Nobel prize committee awarded her the Nobel Prize and Pultizer the Pulitzer Prize for Wild Irises, readers may think otherwise of her merits.

If you like great poetry our latest Nobel laureate will not disappoint you.

La complejidad de las cosas simples. ¿O es al revés?