Richard Siken's "Crush", selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional,...

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 wi...

From a fountain where "all the roads in the village unite", concentric circles expand into the distance: the young and old, fields, a river, a mountain – the fountain's stone counterpart, where the roads end, human time superimposed on geological tim...

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck's new collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is both passageway between worlds...

Loiuse Gluck has long practised poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal and...

Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Gluck has been exploring a form of her own invention, the book-length sequence which combines worldly dramas and ecstatic utterance, a literal world and the worlds of legend and myth that impart meaning or irony to our wa...

Louise Gluck's award-winning collection of essays is the work of a major poet and a distinguished teacher. She writes of her upbringing, her human and literary antecedents, and she dwells with a scrupulous eye on details of lives and poems, until she...

Louise Gluck interweaves in this book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's Odyssey. Myth and modern life have a lot to teach each other in terms of irony and clarification. Penelope, Circe...

In an essay Louise Gluck says 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 as defining the tasks of the next. The First Five Boo...

Helen Vendler wrote in "The New Republic": "Louise Gluck is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional'...