Louise Gluck has long practised poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortals. To read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphoses into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal, down-to-earth. "The Seven Ages" is Gluck's ninth book, one of her strangest and certainly her most bold. In it - like William Blake's mystical Thel - she gazes down at her own death and in so doing forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible. Her act at once defies and embraces the inevitable and is finally mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap and transformation, flames shoot up the reader's spine. In an essay she writes, "one of the revelations of art is the discovery of a tone or perspective at once wholly unexpected and wholly true to a set of materials". This truth to materials -language, occasion, antecedent - is the proof of a poem.

'for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal' --Nobel Prize in Literature 2020'Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain.' --Washington Post'Characteristically sure-footed, Glück speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings.' --Publishers WeeklyBiografía del autor

Louise Glück, born in 1943, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. She has published eleven books of poetry and a book of essays on poetry, Proofs and Theories (1994). She teaches at Yale University as Writer in Residence and in the Creative Writing Program of Boston University. She was appointed the US Poet Laureate from 2003-2004.