Books like A village life by Louise Glück

Proofs & Theories is a collection of essays by Pulitzer‑winning poet Louise Glück, reflecting her incisive, austere style and deep engagement with contemporary poetic criticism.

A ten‑decade collection of Louise Glück’s lyrical poems, spanning 1962 to 2012, showcasing her evolving voice in American poetry.

Louise Gluck says in one of her essays that every end of a book is for her a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off" in which she discerns the themes, habits, and preoccupations of the previous volume to define the tasks of the next. The First Four Books of Poems shows this poet in the conscious evolution she describes, marking time in changes. Readers will hear specifics of sequence: where the ferocious tension of her first book, Firstborn, moves towards the more finely-spun lyricism of her second, The House on Marshland. They will also discover how the charged nouns of that book acquire more intimate weight to become the icons in her third, Descending Figure, and then rise to an archetypal mythic scale in The Triumph of Achilles. These poems are as various as the force of Gluck's intelligence is constant. . In another essay, she cautions, "the deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade." The First Four Books of Poems attests to how truly Gluck has tested and proven the validity of her own warning. The fierce, austerely beautiful voice that has become Gluck's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Always she is moving in and around the achingly real, writing poems adamant in their accuracy and depth. Their progression is proof of her commitment to change; with her first four books of poetry collected in a single volume, Louise Gluck shows herself happily "used by time."

An anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, featuring Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and many others.

John Updike’s bildungsroman follows computer programmer Owen Mackenzie from his birth in Willow, Pennsylvania, through his career in Middle Falls, Connecticut, to retirement in Hasskells Crossing, Massachusetts, exploring his evolving relationships with women.

Mark Strand and Eavan Boland guide readers through the diverse world of poetic forms—sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, and more—combining clear explanations with close readings and exemplar poems.

Linda Hogan explores new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth's living beings in A History of Kindness. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy ans sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.--Front cover flap.