Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection 'At last the night surrounded me; / I floated on it, perhaps in it, / or it carried me as a river carries / a boat'. In Louise Gluck's new collection, night takes on the dimensions of myth, becomes the setting for a sequence of journeys and explorations through time and memory, as the speaker of the poems moves backwards into childhood and forwards into 'the kingdom of death'.
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 eleven books 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. In 2009 she delivered the Blashfield Foundation address at the American Academy. Louise Gluck is also a former US Poet Laureate and teaches at Yale University.
