Description
The poem is about a village and its people. The author describes the village and its inhabitants in detail. She also talks about the fountain in the center of the plaza and the different circles of people that it contains. The poem is written in a calm, descriptive manner and focuses on the beauty of the village and its inhabitants.
A Village Life, Louise Glck's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:
All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees-The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.-from tributaries"Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed. Glck has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines-expansive, fluent, and full-manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glck's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.
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