Since, 1990, Louise Gl?ck has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. <I>Vita Nova</i> -- like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence -- combines the ecstatic utterance of <I>The Wild Iris</i> with the worldly dramas elaborated in <I>Meadowlands. Vita Nova</i> is a book that exists in the long moment of spring, a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope, brutal, luminous, and farseeing. Like late Yeats, <I>Vita Nova</i> dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Gl?ck compasses the essential human paradox, a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it.