The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

<p align="left">Louise Glck has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal, and crude. <em>The Seven Ages</em> is Glck's ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible -- an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader's spine.</p>