Louise Gluck's collection is a work of ends and beginnings. Her poetry comes in white-hot sequences of passionate intensity. Vita Nova is a sequence of poems which dramatises the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new life. Vibrant, at times anguished, but never resigned, the voices in this collection are a reminder of both the pleasure and pain which accompany all our relationships. Gluck manages an act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human Hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it.