[Raffel is an American poet, educator, critic, and translator. In this essay, he critiques Glück's poetry up to and including The Triumph of Achilles, which Raffel judges as not fulfilling the promise of the earlier work, and which he assesses as sometimes disconcertingly bad.]

Born in 1943, Louise Glück has published four volumes of poetry: Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure (1980), and The Triumph of Achilles (1985). She has won prizes and awards; she is reasonably well-known. But the kind of acclaim I believe she deserves has not come to her. She is not yet quite the poet she is capable of being. In particular, her last book represents a severe falling off (though the Poetry Society of America gave it the 1985 Melville Cane Award and The National Book Critics Circle gave it its 1986 poetry prize: I do not pretend to infallibility). But the toughness, complexity and, at its best, quite incredible insight and hard, tested truth of her poetry, as well as its masterfully lyric sweep, make her, at the least, one of the most interesting poets working today. Her work needs to be much more fully and widely read, and thought about, and discussed.

Firstborn, obliquely dedicated to Stanley Kunitz, with whom Glück had been studying ("to my teacher"), is rich in promise. The poems are strong, well put-together, and, as might be expected from a poet in her early twenties, both faintly derivative and not yet fully individual. "Southward floated over / The vicious little houses, down / The land." One thinks immediately, and properly, of early Robert Lowell. But there is a clarity, and a complex lyricism, even in these early poems, which mark the young Louise Glück as a poet of more than casual promise. "We had codes / In our house. Like / Locks; they said / We never lock / Our door to you. / And never did." Like her early mentor, Kunitz, Glück is not prepared to sell out a poem for the sake of an effect (as Lowell alas often did). In poems like this she exhibits a conscientiousness, a concern for her craft, and a determined non-pretentiousness; stout bulwarks upon which to build.

And there are poems in Firstborn that, for all their indebtednesses, for all their youthful excesses, also transcend both influences and juvenilities and flow clear and strong to a wonderfully inexorable end:

Memo from the Cave

O love, you airtight bird,
My mouse-brown
Alibis hang upside-down
Above the pegboard
With its tangled pots
I don't have chickens for;
My lies are crawling on the floor
Like families but their larvae will not
Leave this nest. I've let
Despair bed
Down in your stead
And wet
Our quilted cover

So the rotscent
of its pussy-fooing
fingers lingers, when it's over.

There is Lowell, here, and Anne Sexton. There is a superabundance of the tricks that all poets, but especially young poets, dearly love. The last eight lines fairly explode with their own cleverness. And yet that cleverness does not obstruct or mask what is being said, which is both substantive and totally in key with what has come before. Let us not forget, either, that neither Anne Sexton nor Robert Lowell could do better than this at the same age. Indeed, the poems in Lowell's first book, Land of Unlikeness, have strength but far too much straining, featuring large gobs of clotted imagery, whole passages heavy with clumping, stumping over-passion, and in general frequently so over wrought (and overwrought) that one cannot give them credence—a point that Lowell himself proved by later rewriting or abandoning virtually everything in that first book. Glück at her early best is plainly far beyond that sort of thing.

Nor is "Memo from the Cave" the only fully achieved poem in Firstborn.

Nurse's Song

As though I'm fooled. That lacy body managed to forget
That I have eyes, ears; dares to spring her boyfriends on the child.
This afternoon she told me, "Dress the baby in his crochet
Dress," and smiled. Just that. Just smiled,
Going. She is never here. O innocence, your bathinet
Is clogged with gossip, she's a sinking ship,
Your mother. Wouldn't spoil her breasts.
I hear your deaf-numb papa fussing for his tea. Sleep, sleep,
My angel, nestled with your orange bear.
Scream when her lover pats your hair.

Glück has commented, in a long and very helpful private letter: "I have little to say about Firstborn. For a long time I was ashamed of it (when I was writing the poems, of course, I felt quite otherwise). Then, as more years divided me from it, I came to feel toward it a sporadic tenderness. I didn't think it was good. I thought it was good for someone so young."

But "Nurse's Song" is not only very good, it also announces many of the subjects and attitudes of Glück's later and stronger poetry. The poet as social outsider; the strong but hopelessly ambivalent pull between child and surrounding, presumably nurturing adults; deft and deeply felt irony in the face of pretended rather than genuine truth ("I have known no happiness so based in truth," ends another poem in this first book); and a powerful longing for the peace and fulfillment that should have accompanied and embellished childhood but somehow, straitly and miserably, did not.

In the same private letter, Glück lays out a personal history that fully supports and to that extent helps to explain each and all of these themes. "From the first," she writes, "I belonged to my mother: I craved her absolute approval." And: "For about five years (at about age 18) I lived a strange, isolated life at home. In some ways, it was a quite wonderful time: a recreation of infancy. It went better the second time." She indicates, too, severe illness, both physical (epilepsy) and psychological. And not too long after Firstborn appeared, she notes, "in my late twenties, (I) went through a very long silence. Long, and agonizing. I wrote nothing for something more than a year."

Not surprisingly, the technique of Firstborn is distinctly more conventional than any of her later poetry. There are metrical poems, and a good deal of rhyming. Glück's letter is explicit about her reasons for dropping this more traditional approach in the poems that were to follow those of Firstborn: "I think I turned away from rhyme because I stopped wanting to write a harmonious whole. Also, I disliked the sense of virtuosity rhymed poems tended to produce. I didn't want, as a reader, to come away impressed with the writer's bravura. I didn't want skill to be so obvious."

The House on Marshland (1975), a full seven years after her first book, announces from its very first lines a vastly more mature, more individual, and more powerful poet. But it is not the subject matter that has changed, or the thematic pathways. The Glück who appears in this second book is not a different poet, but simply a very much better one. Here is the first poem:

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree

The delicate ease with which Glück associates "harvest" and "pestilence" is typical both of her newfound authority and the stability in her attitudes and stances. Only the perpetual outsider could so casually link that which grows and nurtures to that which destroys. But only a truly mature poet could prepare the way for such a linkage with the patient portraiture of the first seven lines. Indeed, nothing in this poem is in any way labored. Nothing is obvious or calls attention to itself as lines and scenes in the earlier poems sometimes do. Glück wanted a non-virtuosic poetic, and—by age thirty-two—achieved it.

The intensely visualized scene of the first strophe is deeply realized: Glück is a poet who sees piercingly. But each item on which the poem's visual scan turns is given its plain, fair exposition. There is no scamping for effect, no subordination other than the natural, inevitable movement of the eye. And yet the poem's eye is kept focused, apparently effortlessly, on the scene as a whole, on the organic rather than the isolated effect. The control, the mastery, is quite simply dazzling.

Glück has learned, too, how to make leaping transitions, transitions she fashions so expertly that they do not seem to be hurdling the huge chasms that in truth they cross. Note, in the second half of the following poem, how time is crossed and re-crossed. We are first given the fact of pregnancy, then are taken back to the moment of conception ("waiting for my father"), then forward to the moment of birth ("spring … withdrew from me the absolute knowledge of the unborn"), then sharply forward to the mother, perhaps in a photograph, as seen by the child thirty years later ("the brick stoop where you stand, shading your eyes"), and then finally to an indefinite timelessness that is also the source of the book's title ("A marsh grows up around the house …").

For My Mother

It was better when we were
together in one body.
Thirty years. Screened
through the green glass
of your eye, moonlight
filtered into my bones
as we lay
in the big bed, in the dark,
waiting for my father.
Thirty years. He closed
your eyelids with
two kisses. And then spring
came and withdrew from me
the absolute
knowledge of the unborn,
leaving the brick stoop
where you stand, shading
your eyes, but it is
night, the moon
is stationed in the beech tree,
round and white among
the small tin markers of the stars:
Thirty years. A marsh
grows up around the house.
Schools of spores circulate
behind the shades, drift through
gauze flutterings of vegetation.

When Glück uses the chiming of internal rhyme, now, it is as unobtrusive as it possibly can be: "the small tin markers of the stars." Even the poem's powerful refrain, "thirty years," is not signalled to us as a refrain. And not only is the refrain not set off by formal spacing, but each iteration is significantly separated, and by variable distances, in order not to call undue attention to what is a large part of the glue that holds the poem together. The visualization is vivid and intense: "moonlight / filtered into my bones," the then-fetus tells us, "as we lay / in the big bed, in the dark …"

Nor is the visualization simply aimless, merely what an eye happens to see. It is, like everything in this powerful book, tightly controlled. There is no notable amount of darkness in the poems of Firstborn. But The House on Marshland employs a pretty consistently nocturnal landscape. In "All Hallows," the book's first poem, "the hills darken." The second poem opens with the word "night." The third poem, and one of my own favorites (I have anthologized it, as well as others of Glück's), "Gretel in Darkness," opens with "moonlight" and ends with "nights" and a "black forest." The fourth poem is "For My Mother," just reproduced, in which "we lay … in the dark." The fifth poem gives us "immense sunlight," but immediately frames it as "a relief." The sixth poem, "The Magi," another favorite, ends with a "barn blazing in darkness." Shadows and mists, darkness and dusk, predominate in The House on Marshland—not oppressively, not pretentiously, but almost always there.

The sometimes savage stance of the first book, too ("The Chicago Train," for example, ends: "I saw her pulsing crotch … the lice rooted in the baby's hair"), has now become a much more relaxed, even genial humor. The mordancy remains, and is indeed more effective. But it is not so far removed from us. "Summer approaches," ends "To Autumn," "and the long / decaying days of autumn when I shall begin / the great poems of my middle period." "Do not think I am not grateful for your small / kindness to me," begins "Gratitude." "I like small kindnesses." There is a cutting edge to this apparent gentleness that the first book (and most young poets) cannot achieve. In "The School Children" we are shown how "all morning" the childrens' "mothers have labored / to gather the late apples, red and gold / like words of another language," and then we are immediately shown "those who wait behind great desks / to receive these offerings." One thinks of Sir Walter Scott facing up, manfully and accurately, to the superiorities of Jane Austen's work: "The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself … but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and sentiment is denied to me" (emphasis added). I think Glück would welcome exactly that praise, and clearly she deserves it.

Glück has also learned to look both inward and out, with equal facility and insight. Nor does she need vast quantities of words in order to encapsulate full, complete poetic statements.

Departure

My father is standing on a railroad platform.
Tears pool in his eyes, as though the face

glimmering in the window were the face of someone
he was once. But the other has forgotten;
as my father watches, he turns away,
drawing the shade over his face,
goes back to his reading.

And already in its deep groove
the train is waiting with its breath of ashes.

Love Poem

There is always something to be made of pain.
Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another.

The rhythmic progression in these two poems also requires some notice. "Departure" opens with an end-stopped first line, then swings easily into the kind of loping smoothness that is typical of this entire book, and typical too of Glück at her best. But "Love Poem" has a different theme, a different subject, and so has a different rhythm as well. The first three lines are rigidly end-stopped. Even when enjambement begins, in line 4, the poem does not take on a deep, sweeping movement until the next two sentences, each three heavily enjambed lines long, the second sentence ending the poem. Again, these are the furthest thing from obvious, underlined uses of poetic craft. But they are the mark of a master craftsman.

The wryly powerful lyricism Descending Figure (1980), Glück's third book, is once more announced in the opening lines of the first poem, "The Drowned Children": "You see, they have no judgment. / So it is natural that they should drown / first the ice taking them in / and then, all winter, their wool scarves / floating behind them as they sink / until at last they are quiet." It is hard to forget those "wool scarves," though the poet is scrupulous about not fussing over or sentimentalizing or even dramatizing them. The intrinsic truth of the lines takes care of all that for her. Glück is open about her debt to both T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. They "are hugely important to me," she says in the letter already referred to. But at the end of "The Drowned Children," when the lamentations rise and float over the frozen water, the sparse drama is entirely her own: "What are you waiting for / come home, come home, lost / in the waters, blue and permanent." Not many poets know how to use echoic repetitions like "come home, come home." The unfortunate tendency usually is to simply echo away all through a poem, as if the fact of echoing was itself significant. Not only does Glück prepare the way for such quasi-refrains, but she has absorbed and made her own Williams's large tact, his determinedly non-melodramatic discretion.

The influence of Eliot, which begins to manifest itself quite openly in Descending Figure (and becomes too obvious in her most recent book), is not so beneficent. Nor is it unconnected to a tendency to over elaborate descriptions, to landscapes in which some of the pigmentation suddenly strikes the reader as applied, laid on, rather than instrinsic. The second poem in a five-poem sequence, "The Garden"—and I shall say something more of Glück's growing fondness for such sequences in a moment—opens with a passage that is all too like many passages in Four Quartets, especially Burnt Norton. "The garden admires you. / For your sake it smears itself with green pigment, / the ecstatic red of the roses, / so that you will come to it with your lovers." Glück notes, in the same letter already referred to, that '"Four Quartets' I've liked least and read least." But the echoes seem both unmistakable and unfortunate—doubly so, because what is being said begins to become less important than the manner of saying it. "Admit that it is terrible to be like them," the second part of "The Garden" concludes, "beyond harm." That says, frankly, a great deal less than the poet appears to think it does. If it says anything, to be perfectly blunt, what it says is slight, even sentimental, and not worth saying—certainly not worth the skill and attention of a poet like Louise Glück.

The unevennesses of Descending Figure, though disturbing and quite marked, do not deeply disfigure the book. In the first part of "The Garden," for example, Glück manages in three short, end-stopped lines to create a lyrical flow, as well as to analyze a profoundly true insight in utterly masterful style: "And then the losses, / one after another, / all supportable." This is brave as well as useful, cogent as well as quietly packed with strength. There are still further explorations of the "other," notably the male other—an exploration begun in the second book. In "Palais des Arts" a woman watches a small boy throwing "bits of bread into the water." The boy is apparently her son. The poem ends: "She can't touch his arm in innocence again. / They have to give that up and begin / as male and female, thrust and ache." In "Aphrodite" we are told that "A woman exposed as rock / has this advantage: / she controls the harbor … / her thighs cemented shut, barring / the fault in the rock." (The poem seems to me unrelievedly bitter, but Glück has assured me that it "was intended to be funny," adding that "some women find it so. Though not all. Some women take it for an earnest, fierce political statement. No men find it funny.") Glück's stance is not always sympathetic to women, by the way. In "Portland, 1968" she writes: "And the sea triumphs, / like all that is false / all that is fluent and womanly."

There is also a fine set of poems that begin to explore the endless cycles of human existence—a natural development in a maturing poet. As before, Glück can distill into a single line an entire philosophy, beautifully expressed. "What doesn't move, the snow will cover," she writes in "Thanksgiving." It is a poem quite as comfortable with the subtle, shifting interrelationships of external physical world and internalized human idea and emotion as anything in Wallace Stevens. So too "Porcelain Bowl," where the references to (but not echoes of) Stevens are more pronounced still. "In a lawn chair, the analogous / body of a woman is arranged, / and in this light / I cannot see what time has done to her." The governing phrase, "in this light," seems peculiarly, uniquely her own. In "Happiness," which opens with a "man and a woman" lying "on a white bed," the ending is a triumphant, transcendent embodiment of the title's assertion. They are asleep, it is morning. "Almost over this room / the sun is gliding. / Look at your face, you say, / holding your own close to me / to make a mirror. / How calm you are. And the burning wheel / passes gently over us." Perhaps the most powerful poem in the book is "The Gift," again a favorite and one I have anthologized.

The Gift

Lord, You may not recognize me
speaking for someone else.
I have a son. He is
so little, so ignorant.
He likes to stand
at the screen door, calling
oggie, oggie, entering
language, and sometimes
a dog will stop and come up
the walk, perhaps
accidentally. May he believe
this is not an accident?
At the screen
welcoming each beast
in love's name, Your emissary.

I know of no other poet now writing who could have written this poem. To use a pianistic metaphor, the "touch" is both utterly sure and absolutely individual.

But there are the strained, straining poems. And there are the poem sequences, six of them. In a book of only forty-eight pages that constitutes a significant presence. There are only two poem sequences in Firstborn, which is both a longer and more closely printed book. There is one two-part poem, and no true poem sequence at all, in The House on Marshland, which seems to me the most fully consistent of her collections to date. And since I find only two of Descending Figure's poem sequences entirely convincing, and since The Triumph of Achilles (it has sixty pages), about which I have serious doubts, features no fewer than eight poem sequences, some of them quite long, I think some emphasis needs to be placed on these facts. And some explanation, no matter how tentative (and quite possibly how wrong), needs to be ventured for so errant and probably misguided a direction.

It should be said unequivocally that there is nothing intrinsically flawed about a desire to write longer poems, including longer poems composed out of shorter poems, some of those smaller poems having been initially published separately. Many superb poets, T.S. Eliot among them, have followed this practice with obvious success. The problem is not in the idea but in the fact that "Between the idea / And the reality … Falls the Shadow." I have alluded to the straining in the sequence, "The Garden." If there is a unifying theme, it is overly intellectualized, insufficiently embodied. The next sequence, "Descending Figure," is shorter (only three component poems) and structurally more fully, more tightly realized: it is one of the two sequences that seem really to work, in her third book. Built around the stark fact that Glück's parents lost their first child, also a daughter, seven days after the child's birth, "Descending Figure" moves carefully across a limited and sharply controlled poetic terrain. The same should be said of "Illuminations," again composed of only three parts and again built around the growth of the poet's son. (Oddly, the poet says that she no longer likes this sequence. It seems to me finely done, ending with the child at "the kitchen window / with his cup of apple juice. / Each tree forms where he left it, / leafless, trapped in his breath.")

But "Tango," in four parts, tries, I suspect, to do too much with the relationship between sisters—tries, that is, to find and assert truths that are only doubtfully true. Or, to put it differently, the sequence attempts to do more than the material will allow. Why are some sisters chosen by "the light"? "How they tremble," we are told, "as soon as the moon mounts them, brutal and sisterly …" If this is no more than a reference to physical maturation (i.e., menstruation), it is vastly overblown. If it is a reference to something else, the poem does not reveal what that something else might be. Nor do the succeeding lines help much: "I used to watch them, / all night absorbed in the moon's neutral silver / until they were finally blurred, disfigured …" So too the relationship between the sisters seems over-dramatized: "You were the gold sun on the horizon. / I was the judgement, my shadow / preceded me, not wavering …" This is not convincing, nor is it illuminating. The poem continues: "Your bare feet / became a woman's feet, always / saying two things at once." This is either obvious or pretentious; in either case, it does not make for good poetry.

"Dedication to Hunger," which has five parts, seems to strike poses rather than directly deal with its subject, the relationship between daughters (and mothers) and their fathers. The grandfather's "kiss would have been / clearly tender," the second poem ends. "Of course, of course. Except / it might as well have been / his hand over her mouth." Not only is there nothing in the poem, or the sequence, to justify this final line, there is about it a strong sense of overstatement, an unpleasant flavor of far too easily achieved drama—that is, melodrama. "Lamentations," the final sequence in Descending Figure, similarly mythologizes—but abstractly, unconvincingly—a basic human context, namely Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The very language glitters too artificially. "But god was watching. / They felt his gold eye / projecting flowers on the landscape." This is ingenious, it is felicitously phrased. But it is also terribly intellectualized; it works far too hard at saying something that does not require anything like so much effort—and which, once said, does not have anything like the import, the weight, that the poet seems to think it has. "Against the black sky," we read in the third of the sequence's four poems, "they saw the massive argument of light." This too is strained and straining, trying to be and to say more than it either is or can possibly be.

With only two or three exceptions, The Triumph of Achilles seems to me to suffer from the same deficiencies, not only in its many and very long sequences, but in most of its shorter poems as well. Glück is too fine a poet, and I have much too much respect for her work, to belabor the point—or the book. Here is "The Reproach." Let me say in advance that I find it an embarrassingly bad performance, full of tritenesses, unfortunate echoes of H.D., and about as totally unconvincing as might be.

The Reproach

You have betrayed me, Eros.
You have sent me
my true love.

On a high hill you made
his clear gaze;
my heart was not
so hard as your arrow.

What is a poet
without dreams?
I lie awake; I feel
actual flesh upon me,
meaning to silence me—
Outside, in the blackness,
over the olive trees,
a few stars.

I think this is a bitter insult:
that I prefer to walk
the coiled paths of the garden,
to walk beside the river
glittering with drops
of mercury. I like to lie
in the wet grass beside the river,
running away, Eros,
not openly, with other men,
but discreetly, coldly—

All my life
I have worshipped the wrong gods.
When I watch the trees
on the other side,
the arrow in my heart
is like one of them,
swaying and quivering.

This is perhaps the single worst poem in the book, and easily the worst by Louise Glück that I have ever seen. But the eight sequences in the book are almost as slack. "Marathon," a nine-part sequence that occupies eleven printed pages, is a curious mixture of occasionally brilliant lines, flooded and ultimately drowned in a veritable sea of words—and many of them derivative words. "Finally, this is what we craved, / this lying in the bright light without distinction—/ we who would leave behind / exact records." The echoes of T.S. Eliot, at such moments, are deafeningly loud. There are others. Even when she creates a viable image, Glück seems unable to leave it alone. "In the river, things were going by—/ a few leaves, a child's boat painted red and white." This would be a lovely pair of lines—if they were all Glück had written. But she goes on, the period after "white" being in fact a comma: "its sail stained by the water." This may seem a small matter; to a nonpoet it may seem even niggling. But it is neither small nor niggling—and there is much more of the same sort, sometimes a flickering alternation of bad and good passages, all jumbled hard upon each other. "And, where there are cities, these dissolve too, the sighing gardens [BAD: trite], all the young girls / eating chocolates in the courtyard [GOOD], slowly I scattering the colored foil [BAD: going on far too long]" (emphasis added). There is a great deal of what strikes me as pure verbiage, essentially empty of content. "I see / that ice is more powerful than rock, than mere resistance." "The calm of darkness / is the horror of Heaven." "Why did we worship clarity, / to speak, in the end, only each other's names, / to speak, as now, not even whole words, / only vowels?" "What began as love for you / became a hunger for structure." And so on. There is even a bit of secondhand Ernest Hemingway, of all things. "When my lover touches me, what I feel in my body / is like the first movement of a glacier over the earth, / as the ice shifts, dislodging great boulders, hills / of solemn rock."

"The End of the World," a three-part sequence, seems like thinned-out talk, going nowhere—until the final, brilliant line: "There is no god / who will save one man." But nothing builds toward this line; it rises, solitary, out of the limp three pages that precede it—and no matter how brilliant, a final line must stand on something in order to reach any sort of proper height.

What has happened? "I ask you," says the fourth and last part of "Baskets," "how much beauty / can a person bear?" Is it that the poet has at least for the moment become The Poet, and also the Prophet? There are prophetic poems in The Triumph of Achilles, and they are not good poems. In "Morning," for example, we are told that "mothers weep at their daughters' weddings, / everyone knows that, though / for whose youth one cannot say." This is clearly not Glück's proper strength; she does this sort of thing drably. In "Elms," which reads like an exercise poem, written to keep the machine running, the parts oiled, we begin with a sad Eliot echo: "All day I tried to distinguish / need from desire." This too is not Glück's forte, any more than is the last part of the poem: "I have been looking / steadily at these elms / and seen the process that creates / the writhing, stationary tree / is torment, and have understood / it will make no forms but twisted forms." But there is nothing to this, either in the poem or out of it. Why? we are obliged to demand. Why is it "torment" that creates the tree, or elm trees in particular? What is this about? The final line has all the force, and also all the credibility, of a famous television commercial, in which the late Orson Welles proclaims that the vintner for whom he speaks "will sell no wine before its time."

I do not mean to mock Louise Glück. She is an immensely fine poet. But for the moment, inexplicably, she strikes me as a poet who has lost her way. I cannot believe that she will not emerge, again triumphant, as the poet of The House on Marshland and Descending Figure. As she herself writes, in one of two beautifully realized poems in this most recent book, "Seated Figure": "You could no more heal yourself / than I could accept what I saw."