Call number
811 GLU
Collection
Publication
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2014), Edition: 1St Edition, 80 pages
Description
Louise Gluck is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member muddyboy
A wonderful and highly acclaimed collection of poetry by one of the preeminent American poets of our lifetime. I could just read this book over and over and I get something new and rewarding from her words with each reading. There is a whole lot here especially for someone who is her contemporary
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age wise. She selflessly shares some of the struggles and triumphs of her life in a stunning visual language that I never experience from other authors. There are longer multi page poems and shorter vignettes but all are chock full of significance for the reader. Show Less
LibraryThing member jphamilton
After gorging myself in Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012, a hefty volume of her collected poetry, I read this thin collection from 2014. Her normally austere and controlled poetry looks at the universe’s chaos and sees that some of the stories that we use to try and understand the world with,
A New York Times review speaks of the book’s “moments of startling presence, when everyday facts turn magical, when disenchantment itself leads to renewed enchantment. It is a great good fortune to hold these poems in hand.”
I was taken by the final poem of the book, “The Couple in the Park.” It starts with, “A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone.” The poem then follows some of the possibilities of what the nature of their relationship might be. Granted, I’m a broken widower who sees many things with a wildly skewed heart, but this fine poem and its companions have enough expressed feelings for any poetry lover.
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prove to be lacking. It is curious to see a poet who so often writes about renewal, now focusing on a future that could well be about endings, including her own mortality. A New York Times review speaks of the book’s “moments of startling presence, when everyday facts turn magical, when disenchantment itself leads to renewed enchantment. It is a great good fortune to hold these poems in hand.”
I was taken by the final poem of the book, “The Couple in the Park.” It starts with, “A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone.” The poem then follows some of the possibilities of what the nature of their relationship might be. Granted, I’m a broken widower who sees many things with a wildly skewed heart, but this fine poem and its companions have enough expressed feelings for any poetry lover.
Show Less
LibraryThing member lethalmauve
A haunting poetry collection about loss drenched in all its frightful beauty and trembling honesty, Faithful and Virtuous Night weaves a subdued narrative with each poetic piece. The lasting memories of childhood deeply press against several dreamlike stanzas while it mourns for what can't ever be
Some excerpts that struck me — —
"Constituent
memories of a large memory.
Points of clarity in a mist, intermittently visible,
like a lighthouse whose one task
is to emit a signal.
But what really is the point of a lighthouse?
This is north, it says.
Not: I am your safe harbor."
— from Faithful and Virtuous Night
"The street was white again,
all the bushes covered with heavy snow
and the trees glittering, encased with ice.
I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.
It seemed the longest night I had ever known,
longer than the night I was born.
I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say “I,” it refers to you."
— from Visitors from Abroad
"Your life is enviable, he said;
what must I think of when I cry?
And I told him of the emptiness of my days,
and of time, which was running out,
and of the meaninglessness of my achievement,
and as I spoke I had the odd sensation
of once more feeling something
for another human being—"
— from The Melancholy Assistant
"Feeling has departed—it occurs to me
this would make a fine headstone.
But I was wrong to suggest
this has occurred before.
In fact, I have been hounded by feeling;
it is the gift of expression
that has so often failed me.
Failed me, tormented me, virtually all my life."
— from Approach of the Horizon
My encounter with Glück was sparse prior, only stumbling upon her once or twice when I needed the embrace and kisses of poetry online. To finally read a collection of hers a little earlier before I heard of her Nobel Prize win is pleasing serendipity. Faithful and Virtuous Night suffices as an introduction to a remarkably graceful contemporary poet.
Not part of this collection, Vespers remains my favourite poem of hers.
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grasped nor held again. Adulthood revisits, questions, and affirms. And it reverberates with the ache that pierces in the spaces of its words. Glück magnificently recognises our struggle to reconcile, the attempt to interpret the seemingly unacceptable twist of fate and choice; the inevitable end of life; ageing and time. However, Faithful and Virtuous Night becomes palpably intimate enough to be alienating; expansive enough it can amble excessively on some verses. By the end, there are only marks on my skin from its grip; my mouth dry from the words it spoke for my sake.Some excerpts that struck me — —
"Constituent
memories of a large memory.
Points of clarity in a mist, intermittently visible,
like a lighthouse whose one task
is to emit a signal.
But what really is the point of a lighthouse?
This is north, it says.
Not: I am your safe harbor."
— from Faithful and Virtuous Night
"The street was white again,
all the bushes covered with heavy snow
and the trees glittering, encased with ice.
I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.
It seemed the longest night I had ever known,
longer than the night I was born.
I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say “I,” it refers to you."
— from Visitors from Abroad
"Your life is enviable, he said;
what must I think of when I cry?
And I told him of the emptiness of my days,
and of time, which was running out,
and of the meaninglessness of my achievement,
and as I spoke I had the odd sensation
of once more feeling something
for another human being—"
— from The Melancholy Assistant
"Feeling has departed—it occurs to me
this would make a fine headstone.
But I was wrong to suggest
this has occurred before.
In fact, I have been hounded by feeling;
it is the gift of expression
that has so often failed me.
Failed me, tormented me, virtually all my life."
— from Approach of the Horizon
My encounter with Glück was sparse prior, only stumbling upon her once or twice when I needed the embrace and kisses of poetry online. To finally read a collection of hers a little earlier before I heard of her Nobel Prize win is pleasing serendipity. Faithful and Virtuous Night suffices as an introduction to a remarkably graceful contemporary poet.
Not part of this collection, Vespers remains my favourite poem of hers.
Show Less
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Poetry — 2014)
T. S. Eliot Prize (Shortlist — 2014)
Globe and Mail Top 100 Book (Fiction — 2014)
Pages
80
ISBN
0374152012 / 9780374152017