A new edition of the Nobel laureate’s searing fifth collection of poetry, about “the myth of a happy family” (
The New York Review of Books
).
Louise Glück, the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, was an era-defining poet: innovative, brave, and wholly individual. Her work has left an indelible mark on the literature of our nation and of the world.
Ararat
, Glück’s fifth collection of poetry, centers on the death of her father. Here she creates a ruthlessly probing family portrait and confronts the difficulties and intricacies of a daughter’s relationship to her parents. The result is a subtle and determined collection in which the poet interrogates both her own life and the whole world that emanates from it. “I was born to a vocation,” she writes, “to bear witness / to the great mysteries. / Now that I’ve seen both / birth and death, I know / to the dark nature these / are proofs, not / mysteries—”