The Seven Ages

Louise Glück has long practiced 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 crude. The Seven Ages is Glück's ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible -- an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader's spine.

Louise Gluck has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Bobbitt National Poetry Prize, and the Ambassador's Award for her poetry, as well as the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her previous book, Vita Nova, won the first annual New Yorker Readers Award. Louise Gluck teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts