Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Gluck has been exploring a form of her own invention, the book-length sequence which combines worldly dramas and ecstatic utterance, a literal world and the worlds of legend and myth that impart meaning or irony to our ways of life, love and separation. Vita Nova exists in a long moment of spring, of deaths and beginnings. The verse is far-seeing, written in the elected shadow of Dante. Gluck brings her subjects into sharp focus: the smallest human hopes in the light of the vast forces that shape and thwart them.