Seven Ages
Loiuse Gluck has long practised 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 Gluck'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 defied and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up at the reader's spine.
About the author
Louise Gluck, born in 1943, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection "The Wild Iris". She has published eleven books of poetry and a book of essays on poetry, "Proofs and Theories" (1994). She teaches at Yale University as Writer in Residence and in the Creative Writing Program of Boston University. She was appointed the US Poet Laureate from 2003-2004.