by choosing to give three different poems the same title, “Burning Leaves.” In the first poem, Glück compares a farmer burning dead leaves at sunset to human death, as well as to the cycle of nature whereby “death [makes] room for life.” In the second poem, the burning leaves yearn to escape the confines of their fiery grave, “those last sparks/ still resisting, unfinished.” In the third poem, the dead leaves flare, are self-consumed, and disappearan apt metaphor for the brevity of life and the permanence of death. Glück writes, “How fast it all goes, how fast the smoke clears./ And where the pile of leaves was,/ an emptiness that suddenly seems vast.”

Similarly, Glück includes two poems, each named “Bats,” that deal with the quick passage of life into death. The first concerns human striving to see beyond the physical, corporeal world, while the second chillingly avers that a human “knows nothing of death [except that] death terrifies us all into silence.” She also includes two poems titled “Earthworm.” In the first, an earthworm gently mocks the human fear of burial, while the second even more gently allows that, although death is the only part of life that makes us part of the infinite, “it is the nature of those/ who walk on the surface to fear the depths.”

Mutability takes on more tangible dimensions in the body imagery that permeates these poems. In youth, “your body doesn’t listen. It knows everything now,” writes Glück of adolescence in “Noon.” In “Midsummer,” she says, “because they had new bodies since last summerthey wanted to exhibit them.” As the young woman in “A Night in Spring” celebrates her own beautiful, young body, “she falls in love with it and vows to protect it.”

As old age and death approach, “Watching your body change is hard,” writes Glück in “Figs.” An elderly woman in “A Warm Day,” says of her hands, “how old they are. It’s not the beginning, it’s the end.” Glück declares in “Walking at Night,” “When you look at a body, you see a history/ Once that body isn’t seen anymore/ the story it tried to tell gets lost.” The deterioration and ultimate loss of one’s physical being is a most painful symbol of life’s transience. A woman in the valedictory poem “Crossroads” addresses her body with, “now that we will not be traveling together much longer/ I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you.It is not the earth I will miss/ it is you.”

Besides employing body imagery to reinforce this vital theme of mutability, Glück uses very specific and powerful image patterns, the most frequent being light, darkness, and twilight. For Glück, life lasts but a day, so childhood and youth are bathed in bright sunlight, while adulthood, old age, and death are wrapped in a gossamer veil of deepening darkness. In “Pastoral,” the bright sunlight is emblematic of “midafternoon, midsummer,” while in “Noon,” the summertime of youth, free from school, encourages children to strive to stop time. By the end of the poem, however, twilight comes, followed by dusk. They bring the recognition that childhood is sadly evanescent. In “Before the Storm,” darkness threatens to be permanent, with the frightening caveat that “the world beyond the night remains a mystery.” “Fatigue” is a poem of increasing darkness, its verses telling of winter and defeat.

Even when a poem begins in bright sunlight, such as in “Via Delle Ombre,” shadows soon appear and night follows, the ultimate night being one’s “reunion with earth.” “Harvest” has a clearly autumnal feel, connoting the encroachment of death. Through light imagery, Glück warns her readers of the stark reality of mutability in “Threshing”: “The sky’s bright, but twilight is coming.”

In addition to mutability, Glück writes of people’s physical or emotional alienation from nature by using window imagery. In “Twilight,” she describes the human alienation from the natural world as seeing “In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape/ representing the world.” Windows can create a barrier, a sense of separateness, too, as in “Harvest,” where the speaker sits at a bedroom window “watching the snow falldetachment meeting detachment.” The young boy in “Before the Storm,” “sent to bedtoo early,” is restrained by the window at which he sits. In an ironic use of window imagery in “Dawn,” the window is an entrance for bringing light in, while in “Via Delle Ombre,” the window becomes an exit to take one outside to death.

Through abrupt and shocking shifts in tone, Glück’s languid, seemingly ordinary declarative language can suddenly turn razor-sharp and express alienation indirectly. In “Pastoral,” the placidly described, halcyon, mist-covered sunrise is followed by the lines, “The sun burns its way through,/ like the mind defeating stupidity” and the shocking, “No one really understands/ the savagery of this place,/ the way it kills people for no reason,/ just to keep in practice.” Similarly, a young child in “First Snow” commonly does not want to sleep because it is not tired; “You may not be tired but I am tired” replies the mother, followed by the narrator’s bitter pronouncement, “Because the mother’s sick to death of her life/ and needs silence.”

In addition to the extraordinary artistry of its individual poems, A Village Life is an important collection of modern poetry because it creates a cohesive, interconnected world, a kaleidoscopic human tapestry of stories, lives, and experiences, all interlocked by the fact of human mortality. By interweaving same-titled poems throughout her collection and through her development of imagery and theme, Glück indicates that all people are connected, unique yet the same. While some critics decried Glück’s use of sparse language and the extreme subtlety of her poems, most critics have celebrated Glück’s ability compellingly to capture the rituals of life in a nuanced and cogent collage of characters and images.

Unlike Glück’s early work (such as The House on Marshland, 1976, which was more ostensibly autobiographical) or her later work (such as The Triumph of Achilles, 1987, which incorporated more biblical and mythological characters and themes) A Village Life constructs a parallel universe created solely by Glück. Echoing her career-long concern with loss and grief (as in such collections as The Wild Iris, 1993), Glück prepared readers for A Village Life through her poem cycle Averno (2006), which evinced a mostly wintry tone reflected in bitter imagery of nature’s parched and frozen earth. The last few poems of A Village Life transcend Averno’s negativity through a stern, rueful, and ultimately stoic acceptance of the fragility and brevity of life’s rituals, as well as life itself.

The archetypal human experiences related in Glück’s collection of elegiac and autumnal poems, A Village Life, rise above stereotype and sentimentality through her tight, muscular, unembellished diction and her unique insights into specific manifestations of the stages of life and the inevitability of death. In a race with the clock, humans make an uneasy truce with time; since every stage of life is necessary and death is assured, they need to experience, if not appreciate, all of life while they have it. Sometimes tender, sometimes bitter, and often intense, Glück probes laserlike into the common core of the human condition. People are indeed all “villagers,” she suggests, as residents of A Village Life. In “Pastoral,” Glück makes mutability a deeply moving metaphor and indelible image for all who live:

When you got tired of walkingyou lay down in the grass.When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you’d been,the grass was slick there, flattened outinto the shape of a body. When you looked back later,it was as though you’d never been there at all.