A Village Life

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 time. This title evokes a Mediterranean world with luminous precision.

Louise Gluck was born in 1943 in New York and grew up on Long Island. She started her teaching career in 1971 at Goddard College, Vermont. At present she is a Professor at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of seven collections of poems and a volume of essays. She has won the Pulitzer Prize (for Wild Iris in 1992), 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 Non-fiction. Her 2000 collection Vita Nova won the first annual New Yorker Readers Award. Louise Gluck is also a former US Poet Laureate.