[The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three:
Ji'nan to Mount Tai, Qing dynasty(1644–1911), 1698 Wang Hui (Chinese, 1632–1717)]

Prior to writing my post yesterday, I scoured the internet for reviews of A Village Life to check my thoughts with those of others. What I found in the online newspapers and other 'established' publications were, at best, scant and boring, and the worst were just awful (one NYC based newspaper making comparisons with Shyamalan's The Village). Good thing we have bloggers and electronic magazines to help poetry out a bit more. A review at Coldfront is excellent:

Classically disciplined, her imagery arises directly out of the setting, evoking an austere, timeless, and archetypal community. Sometimes Glück astounds with loving descriptions of nature: “The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink / as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson” (“March.”) Her infrequent similes provide insight while staying close to home: a pile of burning leaves is “a small thing, controlled, like a family run by a dictator” (“Sunset”); the sun hangs steady “like an actor pleased with his welcome” (“A Warm Day”). Despite maintaining a measured, contemplative tone throughout, she is also able to capture personal inflection: the bartender runs the television with the sound off, and “we spend hours watching this junk” (“Via Delle Ombre”). I caught only one instance of melodrama, at the end of “Hunters”—“the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses”—although this is in persona for the poem. A Village Life is a wise statement about the body’s relation to the earth, and rewards with beautiful if, of necessity, fleeting glimpses of eternity, as in “Sunrise”:

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room.
Whatever was left, that was ours for a while.
But sooner or later the hills will take it back, give it to the animals.
And maybe the moon will send the seas there
and where we once lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills,
paying the sky the compliment of reflection—

Blue in summer. White when the snow falls.