Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

In Vita Nova, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it

Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to the poet, Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova--like its immediate predecessors, a booklength sequence--combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring: a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope; brutal, luminous, and far-seeing.

Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Glück compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that thwart and shape it.

Here, classical myth collides with modern feeling.

• A Modern Mythology: The timeless grief of Orpheus and the defiance of Dido are re-examined through a startlingly contemporary lens.
• Poems of Love and Loss: A book-length sequence that follows the arc of a relationship’s end and the difficult, luminous spring that follows.
• The Paradox of Hope: Glück’s unmistakable voice confronts the essential human paradox—finding a “new life” in the very moments of death and resignation.
• Austere Beauty: Each poem is a masterclass in precision and form, where ecstatic utterance meets worldly drama in a style that is Glück’s alone.

"The book exists at the vanishing point of light. What's left is not darkness, but the amniotic of soul, and hence the title, Vita Nova, new life."