“Lamentations” consists of four brief lyric poem sequences in free verse. Each sequence has its own title: “The Logos,” “Nocturne,” “The Covenant,” and “The Clearing.” Individual sequences contain from three to four stanzas each. These vary from two to seven lines in length, and the lines themselves mimic the stanzas through the economy of words used.

The title of this poem, “Lamentations,” suggests mourning for something irrevocably lost. It especially recalls the Old Testament’s Hebrew prophets lamenting the folly of the Children of Israel and their resultant separation from Jehovah. There are also correspondences between Louise Glück’s sequence titles and the New Testament gospel of Saint John. For example, the title of the first sequence, “The Logos,” recalls John’s story of Jesus Christ, as the gospel of John opens with the phrase, “In the beginning was the Word.” One definition of “word” in this context is the Greek word logos. “The Logos” can be described as cosmic reason or, according to ancient Greek philosophy, as the source of world order and intelligibility. The title of “The Logos” therefore suggests a story of cosmic origins and mythical figures that echoes both Greek and Christian mythology. Indeed, the poem’s first stanza describes archetypal figures of a woman—described as “mournful”—and a man. These figures in turn recall the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden and the origins of humankind. The figures are not alone, according to the poem: “god was watching.”

The second sequence, “Nocturne,” indicates, if not a literal setting, a mood of dusk, with a landscape bathed in twilight that projects feelings of both human warmth and “panic.” Here the reader begins to feel a division between the figures from the preceding sequence: There are three distinct entities, “the man, the woman, and the woman’s body.” The unity of “The Logos” sequence, in which there is woman with man “branching into her body,” is gone. With night comes separation and fear.

The result of this fear is an attempt to procure security in the third sequence, “The Covenant”: “Out of fear, they built a dwelling place.” However, this attempt at unity is thwarted by the “child [who] grew between them.” The division of “man” and “woman” as well as the realization of a child’s dependence upon them force the figures from the first sequence to realize that they are now “mother and father.” They are responsible, and like the god who watched them in “The Logos,” they watch the developing “small discarded body” of their creation.

The final sequence, “The Clearing,” speaks further of the separation and alienation begun in “Nocturne.” Even the familiar becomes strange: “Nothing was as before,” and language, the source of communication, is compared with wounds that show distinctly on the “white flesh” of humans. God, now spelled with a capital G, leaves the children of his creation and ascends into heaven. This final separation between the creator, God, and his children is not openly lamented; instead it is quietly described from the viewpoint of God, who, the narrator muses, must have been awestruck by the beauty of Earth when seen for that first time “from the air.” There is a sense in this closing stanza of both despair at the separation of God from his Creation and wonder at the beauty of that Creation.

“Lamentations” abounds with rich mythic imagery that serves as the poem’s touchstone. The four sequences recall the days of Creation that began with the word, or logos , and ended with night. “The Covenant” echoes the Genesis Creation story, in which God...