Faithful and Virtuous Night

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Faithful and Virtuous Night
First edition
AuthorLouise Glück
GenrePoetry
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date
2014

Faithful and Virtuous Night is a poetry collection by Louise Glück, published in 2014.

Composition and contents[edit]

The collection alternates between traditional poems and paragraph-long prose poems,[1] marking the first inclusion of prose poems in a book by Glück.[2]

Kathryn Davis, a friend of Glück's, read the collection's poems as they were written.[3] She suggested Glück compose and include its prose poems. Glück drew inspiration from the short works of Franz Kafka while writing the collection.

Reception[edit]

In Boston Review, Craig Morgan Teicher wrote that the collection "[...] may be Glück’s strangest work yet, the hardest to describe or put in line with the others."[4] Writing for NPR, Annalisa Quinn both praise and criticized the collection's abstruseness, referring to the prose poems as "blandly koanic" while also writing that some of the "[...] poems' incompleteness and inscrutability are suggestive rather than prohibitive."[5]

Honors and awards[edit]

Glück received the National Book Award for Poetry for the collection.[6] It was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.[7]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Rumens, Carol (25 August 2014). "Poem of the week: A Work of Fiction by Louise Glück". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 October 2020.
  2. ^ Gonzalez, Elisa (Spring 2015). "An Interview with Louise Glück". Washington Square Review. Retrieved 10 October 2020.
  3. ^ Giraldi, William (20 November 2014). "Internal Tapestries: A Q&A With Louise Glück". Poet's & Writers. Retrieved 10 October 2020.
  4. ^ Death Mask (8 January 2015). "Death Mask". Boston Review. Boston Review. Retrieved 10 October 2020.
  5. ^ Quinn, Annalisa (11 September 2014). "The Ecstatic Blankness Of Poet Louise Glück". NPR.org. NPR. Retrieved 10 October 2020.
  6. ^ "'Redeployment,' 'Age Of Ambition' Win National Book Awards". NPR.org. NPR. 19 November 2014. Retrieved 10 October 2020.
  7. ^ Flood, Alison (23 October 2014). "TS Eliot prize shortlist joins conflict and reconciliation in the Middle East". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 October 2020.