Faithful and Virtuous Night

"One reason Glueck has proved so central to American poetry, for five decades now, lies in her remarkable talent for recapturing wonder. For all her disabused austerity, she remains a great poet of renewal . . . What makes Glueck's latest collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, so powerful is the inventiveness with which the poet responds not only to her own mortality, but to the entirely new vantage on the world that her predicament affords ." --Peter Campion, The New York Times Book Review

"Shifting between prosaic passages and her more familiar lyric investigations of family, loss, and time's tide, Glueck's new collection of poems finds cinematic scope through a deeply personal lens. Moving and rich, her mastery of what she knows is matched only by her ease with the uncertain. 'A word drops into the mist, ' she writes, 'like a child's ball into high grass.'" --Michael Andor Brodeur, The Boston Globe

"We go to Glueck, as to all great poets, for what Frost called a 'clarification of life, ' but, like Frost, whom she resembles in no other way, Glueck wants the clarification without sacrificing the doubt. To do this, both poets make their revealed wisdom radically contingent upon circumstance. Nothing is final; certainty is an illusion. And so we find in Glueck's work, as in Frost's, the temptation to truth tempered by the awareness of context." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"Louise Glueck just keeps getting better. One of our finest contemporary poets--as her collected poems showed two years ago--she has changed her aesthetic strategy over the years, moving away from adaptations of Greek and Roman myths toward a new oracular tone of her own." --Arlice Davenport, Wichita Eagle