It's difficult to summarize the career of Louise Glück in a brief review. She's the author of 11 books of poetry, as well as a collection of essays about poetry. Her work has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, along with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She's even been a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the poet laureate of the United States. There are more achievements that could be added to this list, but it is best to let her body of work speak for itself.
Poems 1962-2012 encompasses all of the verse in Glück's previously published books of poetry; with the collection arranged chronologically, the evolution of her career and the development of her work are clearly on display. Glück's style has always been somewhat spare but with evidence of tight control, and these abilities don't waver with time. Later poems, though, demonstrate a shift toward longer narratives and the sort of self-reflection that comes with increasing age, accumulated experience and an awareness of mortality. This retrospective collection is not to be missed. --Roni K. Devlin, owner, Literary Life Bookstore