Louise Gl�ck (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.
"As with her poetry, Gl�ck's prose is fine and pared but visionary; her intelligence is precise and earnest. . . . Here and elsewhere Gl�ck's brevity, clarity, and resolute independence are impressive." -- Publishers Weekly"With this book, [Gl�ck] becomes the patron saint of poets and writers, having fallen and crawled and scared herself to a position from which she reticently gives advice." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review"This first collection of [Gl�ck's] essays is written in a different medium [than her poetry], but it contains the same dark precision, the same spare fates and paradoxes. . . Proofs and Theories. . . is certainly a provocative book. . . it is the prickly poetic testament and memoir of one of America's finest poets." -- Poetry Flash
Although Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gluck ( The Wild Iris ) maintains that she is ``uneasy with commentary,'' her collection of 16 essays, all previously published in literary journals, is often profound. The subjects of her writing include poets Stanley Kunitz, Hugh Seidman, T. S. Eliot; the future (considered in a 1993 Williams College graduation address); education; and the nature of courage. Yet the real lure of her commentary is sensibility, even more than subject. As with her poetry, Gluck's prose is fine and pared but visionary; her intelligence is precise and earnest. She uses mind as a moral power, whether addressing experience or literature. For instance, in ``Disinterestedness,'' Gluck writes in support of an ideal of reading with nearly bias-free receptivity that literary theorists may scoff, but is liberating and persuasive as she explains it. Here and elsewhere, Gluck's brevity, clarity and resolute independence are impressive. (Aug.)
"As with her poetry, Gluck's prose is fine and pared but visionary; her intelligence is precise and earnest. . . . Here and elsewhere Gluck's brevity, clarity, and resolute independence are impressive." -- Publishers Weekly"With this book, [Gluck] becomes the patron saint of poets and writers, having fallen and crawled and scared herself to a position from which she reticently gives advice." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review"This first collection of [Gluck's] essays is written in a different medium [than her poetry], but it contains the same dark precision, the same spare fates and paradoxes. . . Proofs and Theories. . . is certainly a provocative book. . . it is the prickly poetic testament and memoir of one of America's finest poets." -- Poetry Flash
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