Poetry Criticism | Glück, Louise - Anna Wooten (essay date 1975)

Anna Wooten (essay date 1975)

SOURCE: "Louise Glück's The House on Marshland," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 4, No. 3, July-August 1975, pp. 5-6.

[In the following review, Wooten compares Glück's first two books of poetry, asserting that in the second, The House on Marshland, the poet has achieved a wider control in her lyric treatment of the personal and mythical without sacrificing her unique poetic voice.]

For the admirers of Louise Glück's first book of poems (Firstborn, 1968), the second may initially seem less a treat. The House on Marshland lacks some of the verve of the first volume—the characteristic muscularity of language, the skillful use of ellipsis, the yoking of some hard and unlikely images—but it gains in other ways. Part of the charisma of the new volume is its calm surehandedness. Glück's ear never fails her; she manages to be conversational and lyrical at the same time, a...

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