13,50€
Precision of language, tone, and form is everywhere here, and as “night” calls up mortality, also vision, and ultimately a radical instability at the dream-crux of nocturnal relationships, Louise Glück reaches a mastery that allows for its opposite: “Chaos was what I saw.”
NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE. 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.
At last the night surrounded me;
I floated on it, perhaps in it,
or it carried me as a river carries
a boat…
from “Midnight”
You enter the world of this enchanting book through one of its many dreamy gates, and every time you enter, you are in the same place even though everything in there has changed. Woman. Man. Child. Light and darkness. Time timeless. It’s an adventure story, an encounter with the unknown, the fearless journey of a knight to the realm of death. The storytelling or A narrative of the world you have always known, of your first reading, of your first children’s book, only that every familiar aspect of it changes and twinkles, like the outline of a dream. It is an undivided story, with parts, however, variable, enigmatic narrative context, heartbreaking tone. It is a confessional, profoundly personal, and at the same time universal negotiation of loss and mourning in all their forms. The poetry collection Faithful and Virtuous Night was the winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.
Also included as an insert the Nobel Lecture by Louise Glück Nobel Laureate in Literature 2020.
For all her disabused austerity, she remains a great poet of renewal. This is not a matter of optimism, or “recovery” in the conventional sense. […] There’s not a hint of easy consolation, much less any “triumph of the human spirit” in this book. But neither does the abiding darkness entail despair… The high art and deep pleasure of “Faithful and Virtuous Night” derive from similar moments, moments of startling presence, when everyday facts turn magical, when disenchantment itself leads to renewed enchantment.
From its opening pages, “Faithful and Virtuous Night” is governed by the logic of medieval dream vision, where the enigmas of the day are not resolved but, rather, reconceived as symbol and allegory….We go to Glück, as to all great poets, for what Frost called a “clarification of life,” but, like Frost, whom she resembles in no other way, Glück wants the clarification without sacrificing the doubt.
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Louise Glück
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