¡°Though it resembles her others least, A Village Life may come to be seen as Gl?ck's most beautiful and moving book so far . . . [It] shows a ripening of Gl?ck's genius, her mastery for depicting the things of this earth . . . [and] can be seen as the work of a master poet who has done what many poets long to do: she has written about death immortally.¡± ¡ªAdam Fitzgerald, Rain Taxi
¡°A Village Life magnificently extends the landscapes, the harmonics, and the dramatis personae of Averno . . . More than any of Gl?ck's previous volumes, A Village Life has a generous heart, a large spiritual scope in which to imagine the lives of others.¡± ¡ªRosanna Warren, The New Republic
¡°Not many poets can be electrifying while keeping the stakes this hypothermically low. Gl?ck is a master, finely calibrating the shocks and their intervals. This collection, her 11th, is frightening the way a living statue would be frightening if it were to smile at you.¡± ¡ªDana Goodyear, Los Angeles Times
¡°Here is a poet at the unmistakable peak of her expressive power and experience . . . The characters in A Village Life do what the voice tells them. ¡®It says forget, you forget. / It says begin again, you begin again.' Louise Gl?ck begins again, unforgettably, in this profound new collection of poems.¡± ¡ªCarol Muske-Dukes, Huffington Post
¡°This 11th book of verse by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gl?ck offers beautiful language with a sense of loss and disappointment . . . The poems in A Village Life combine the intensity of her early work and the longer lines and insight of more recent books. The writing is often hauntingly beautiful . . . There are stanzas where Gl?ck makes her landscape seem so radiant or exquisite that you don't want to turn the page.¡± ¡ªElizabeth Lund, Christian Science Monitor
¡°Like Cavafy's persona pieces, the real subject of these poems is often a particular mood, not the transmission of details that distinguish, say, a child's voice from a farmer's . . . Gl?ck lets us hear the silence that follows in the confessional. In my favorite poems in A Village Life, she also shows us what one who has heard that silence can now say.¡± ¡ªZach Savich, Kenyon Review
¡°Louise Gl?ck is one of America's most famous poets, and one of the best . . . The fictions here are really a pretext for Gl?ck to stage poems that explore, for the first time, material that is neither explicitly her own biography nor that of her mythical stand-ins. Always at the mercy of the Greek gods that inspired her earlier poems, Gl?ck now is playing God herself.¡± ¡ªMorgan Teicher, Cleveland Plain Dealer