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    Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems
    Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems
    Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems
    Ebook78 pages49 minutes

    Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems

    By Louise Gluck

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    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

    Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

    A luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times)     Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

    Louise Glück 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.

    Editor's Note

    Nobel Prize winner…

    Louise Glück won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” according to the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award. Glück has long been considered one of America’s greatest contemporary poets, and this melancholic National Book Award-winning poetry collection is one of her best.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781466875463
    Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems
    Author

    Louise Gluck

    Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Faithful and Virtuous Night

    4/5

    117 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Glück’s poetry is really good. Her concepts are of longing, questioning, solitudes, sadness, reality, tragedy. They were well thought and quite provoking.
    • 5/5
      I like how each poem references one another. Bloody brilliant.
    • 5/5
      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, 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.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      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 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.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Faithful and Virtuous Night - Louise Gluck

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    CONTENTS

    Title Page

    Copyright Notice

    Parable

    An Adventure

    The Past

    Faithful and Virtuous Night

    Theory of Memory

    A Sharply Worded Silence

    Visitors from Abroad

    Aboriginal Landscape

    Utopia

    Cornwall

    Afterword

    Midnight

    The Sword in the Stone

    Forbidden Music

    The Open Window

    The Melancholy Assistant

    A Foreshortened Journey

    Approach of the Horizon

    The White Series

    The Horse and Rider

    A Work of Fiction

    The Story of a Day

    A Summer Garden

    The Couple in the Park

    Also by Louise Glück

    Copyright

    PARABLE

    First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,

    in order that our souls not be distracted

    by gain and loss, and in order also

    that our bodies be free to move

    easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss

    whither or where we might travel, with the second question being

    should we have a purpose, against which

    many of us argued fiercely that such purpose

    corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,

    whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated

    pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as

    a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it

    glimmering among the stones, and not

    pass blindly by; each

    further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,

    so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,

    like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,

    which in time abated—where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,

    and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line

    so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.

    Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which

    some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem

    to have achieved an agreement, our canteens

    hoisted upon our shoulders; but always that moment passed, so

    (after many years) we were still at that first stage, still

    preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;

    we could see this in one another; we had changed although

    we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling

    from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed

    in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose

    believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free

    in order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed.

    AN ADVENTURE

    1.

    It came to me one night as I was falling asleep

    that I had finished with those amorous adventures

    to which I had long been a slave. Finished with love?

    my heart murmured. To which I responded

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