A Village Life -

Louise Glück

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2009

80 páginas

2h 40m

ISBN-13: 9780374283742

A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:

All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.

Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—

The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;

on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.

—from "tributaries"

Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.

Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

Earthworm

"Moral standing on top of the earth, refusing
to enter the earth: you tell yourself
you are able to see deeply
the conflicts of which you are made but, facing death,
you will not dig deeply—if you sense
that pity engulfs you, you are not
delusional: not all pity
descends from higher to lesser, some
arises out of the earth itself, persistent
yet devoid of coercion. We can be split in two, but you are
mutilated at the core, your mind
detached from your feelings—
repression does not deceive
organisms like ourselves:
once you enter the earth, you will not fear the earth;
once you inhabit your terror,
death will come to seem a web of channels or tunnels like
a sponge’s or honeycomb’s, which, as part of us,
you will be free to explore. Perhaps
you will find in these travels
a wholeness that eluded you—as men and women
you were never free
to register in your body whatever left
a mark on your spirit.

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It is not sad not to be human
nor is living entirely within the earth
demeaning or empty: it is the nature of the mind
to defend its eminence, as it is the nature of those
who walk on the surface to fear its depths -- one's
position determines one's feelings. And yet
to walk on top of a thing is not to prevail over it --
it is more the opposite, a disguised dependency,
by which the slave completes the master. Likewise
the mind disdains what it can't control,
which will in turn destroy it. It is not painful to return
without language or vision: if, like the Buddhists,
one declines to leave
inventories of the self, one emerges in a space
the mind cannot conceive, being wholly physical, not
metaphoric. What is your word? Infinity, meaning
that which cannot be measured."