SOURCE: Longenbach, James. “Louise Glück's Nine Lives.” Southwest Review 84, no. 2 (1999): 184–98.

In the following essay, Longenbach compares Vita Nova with Glück's previous collections, particularly Meadowlands, The Wild Iris, and Ararat.

Vita Nova, Louise Glück's eighth book of poems, begins with this enigmatic exchange between master and apprentice.

The master said You must write what you see. But what I see does not move me. The master answered Change what you see. 

Change is Louise Glück's highest value. Each of her books has begun, she admits, in a “conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off” of the work preceding it. But because of what Glück calls in Vita Nova her “inflexible Platonism,” she is both entranced and threatened by “something beyond the archetype.” If change is what she most craves, it is also what she most resists, what is most difficult for her, most hard-won. And...