[In this review excerpt, Bedient discusses Glück's Ararat, finding the direct tone to be different than her previous volumes. Nonetheless, the critic finds the collection to be successful due to the precision and concentration of poems.]

Desire has become the most commonplace of topics, and not only because, like the weather, it is always with us, but because it doesn't know what to make of itself now that its own gaudy theological and philosophical trappings have been emptied of gas, like giant passenger balloons, and cut into rectangles and put on the wall as abstract art.

What poets (the house experts on the subject) may now regret is that walking naked is all that's left to them. The Plotinian There, the Fall, millions of flaming swords drawn from the things of mighty Cherubim, the light that never was on sea or land, progress, usury, supreme fictions—the whole panoply of grand and cranky themes has rusted.

Stripped-down desire—desire without transcendental dignities—is the burden of new books of poems by Louise Glück, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky. All three poets are in what looks like mid-career and all three are among the finest now writing in English. And partly because their new books are so marvellously accomplished, one wants to say that this is a rich time for American poetry. And I believe it is. But if the big themes are dead? If the ladder has been lifted from the rag and bone shop of the heart? Or is desire, for all its present sorriness, even yet a great subject?

With some ambivalent exceptions, the three poets treat it as merely inescapable and necessary: you will dress your bones in rags, won't you, rather than walk naked?….

In Ararat, Glück's few allusions to Greek tragedy may essay a heroic resonance, as if she thought desire could still be construed as tragic; but is she not, all the same, an A+ analysand who's been sealed in the almost airless bubble of her own lucidity? (Her commitment to this last is her heroism.)….

Still, a certain passionate toughness in Louise Glück makes you feel that this poet could have been a Greek heroine—Electra, perhaps. That is why she's scary when she steps into the delicate, habitually evasive sphere of family grievances (though Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds have so opened the way that it's now posted: Anything goes). She enters and the walls tremble; the sphere is so small, in its way, so unarmed, in its way, and she—she is equipped with a child's accusations of betrayal and deprivation, with her adult, fearful intelligence, and with the sharpest verbal instrument around.

Not that she raises her voice; she doesn't need to—she makes every word say, I am only going to tell you this once; she is all deliberation, and then some. But her topics scathe: indeed, they telescope into the one topic, desire as the scathed and the scathing, not least the self-scathing ("in childhood," she says in the final poem, "First Memory," "I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved"). Her burden is less the legendary loss of a fusional bliss than the heart's reasonable/unreasonable fixation on it. The heart! The instant it gains consciousness it is kicked out the door and it reacts as if something had injured it! And you don't comfort Louise. She isn't having any of it. No, you respect her instead:

It's very sad, really: all my life, I've been praised
for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.
In the end, they're wasted—

I never see myself,
standing on the front steps, holding my sister's hand.
That's why I can't account
for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.

In my own mind, I'm invisible; that's why I'm dangerous.

This in a poem called "The Untrustworthy Speaker." Ararat, even more than her earlier great successes, The House on Marshland and Descending Figure (I thought less well of The Triumph of Achilles), is full of a snowmaiden's dry-ice kisses.

It substitutes a knife-edge directness for this poet's redoubtable ability to cast spells. The almost eerily exquisite dream-hushed scenes of the earlier books will be missed by many, but maybe this new, hard tone is something braver, at once more modern and more severely classical. Metaphorical transformations, rippling across whole poems, and rhythmic hypnosis, at which this poet can be so astonishing, and a remotely intimate tone—these gifts are kept back. In their place, a Long Island house; a mother brooding over the death of her third child, a girl; another daughter, blond, who crowds the poet at the watering hole of maternal love; a snoozing father practicing for death by covering his face with the Times; and the older living daughter, Louise, the dark one, the one who sees all this, the one who counts the short change of love and doesn't say anything, the one whose skin jumps with the truth like a frog even as she simulates being something without nerves, without anger, "Not inert: still. / A piece of wood. A stone" ("Parodos"). One summer in Paris, when she sat for her portrait each day after returning from the convent school, only the painter noticed how it really was: "a face already so controlled, so withdrawn, / and too obedient, the clear eyes saying / If you want me to be a nun, I'll be a nun" ("Appearances").

Ararat is distinguished by a starkly etched grief (in essence, every family's grief, in a cat's cradle geometry of separations and intertwinements) and, in relation to it, a consummate, if not fulfilling, understanding. If depression can speak with wit, intelligence, self-irony, some admiration of others' toughness, maybe even a formal forgiveness that is fortunately never expressed as sentiment, maybe even love, not to mention a pain that is never fingered, but merely put forth, then Ararat—named after a cemetery and alluding to the resting place of the ark that saved human life from the deluge and, beyond that, to a covenant between intelligence and love—is articulated depression. Most of the sentences are proddingly narrow and as dry as a doctor's tongue-sticks. Every move that the imagined (thoroughly imagined) voice makes is compelling. No matter that the tone is shackled with neutrality, that it is "so controlled, so withdrawn." Precisely this permits the structures of the poems to say everything. These are structures that (it seems) have been injected with phenobarbital. They are truth's cardiograms.

Glück's powers of mind, her presence, her voice are not self-advertising; they are just there, instantly arresting. There's no fat anywhere in the book. The word-work is all as precise and concentrated as an eye operation. On her son coming home from school: "he knows / I'm watching. That's why / he greets the cat, / to show he's capable / of open affection. / My father used / the dog in the same way." It doesn't occur to the language to be anything other than plain and truthful; it doesn't preen. Is this poetry? Yes, art-speech, however unfussy and free of verbal narcissism; syllable weighted against syllable in a way that is just so, all fixed so finally that no accident could dishevel them. Not that it is easy to find the secret of the success. A lifetime of working with words, of paring away at them, of listening is, of course, assumed. And a feeling for the balance of echo and the just off-balance is perhaps crucial, as in these words on her newly widowed mother entertaining visitors:

In her heart, she wants them to go away.
She wants to be back in the cemetery,
back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows
it isn't possible. But it's her only hope,
the wish to move backward. And just a little,
not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.
("A Fantasy")

"She wants … she wants … hospital… possible … She knows … it's her only hope … back … back … backward"; the foiled longing of the foiled rhyme "away" and "cemetery"; the vein-under-the-skin connection of "sick," "wish," and "kiss," the sibilance that keeps failing yet persisting, like the wanting itself; and still more—a verse centered in itself, after all. Capable, all the same, of sudden still-deeper piercings, as when the last sentence takes up the live fish of pathos and guts it with a furious ambiguity: does it mean, not the whole saga of the marriage again, not that? It's no surprise to learn that the poet comes from tough stock: "Now the hero's dead. Like echoes, the women last longer; they're all too tough for their own good" ("A Novel").

Though most of the poems are complete and strong in themselves, it is plain that for the poet they cluster together like wintering bees in a simmering ball, a little organic heater against the cold. The odd-one-out is the poem grandest in itself, "Celestial Music." Here, family is replaced by "a friend who still believes in heaven. / Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god." What the poet and her friend agree on, for all their differences, is the necessary peace of composition. The friend says that "when you love the world you hear celestial music" and "She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image / capable of life apart from her." She has just drawn a circle in the dirt; inside, a dead caterpillar. The two friends are sitting by a road that turns dark, "the rocks shining and glittering": "it's this stillness that we both love. / The love of form is a love of endings." This marks the self-reflexive moment of Ararat, the acknowledgment of being bereft of the old celestial register, and at the same time a bow to the elegiac, indeed posthumous spirit of all formal art. Here the book offers itself as an outcropping of hard deposits that shine in the dying light of a family story, and as a circle, in which the torn victim, if brushed free of a few ants, "doesn't move."

I could do without the poet's claim in "Parados" that "I was born to a vocation: / to bear witness / to the great mysteries." For me, this direct self-regard is less effective than the snow-cold self-mirroring in "Celestial Music." And when Glück says that she and her sister are "like amazons, a tribe without a future," perhaps she confuses patriliny with continuance. But at almost every point Ararat is brilliantly hard as both art and understanding (and here the two seem to be one; no axe could split them apart). It is full of, is distinguished by, unshakably final observation and statement. It illustrates what Walter Pater called "the actually aesthetic charm of a cold austerity of mind." With a clarity of language that is next to silence yet that gives up nothing to it, Glück submits herself to what Valéry called "crystal abysses deeper than Erebus." Although feeling is present in the book, it is like a coffin just lowered into the ground; the style repulses all surface displays of emotion—a discipline the poet learned from her father. When she says goodbye to the latter, whom she knows to be dying, there is

no embrace, nothing dramatic.
When the taxi came, my parents watched from the front door,
arm in arm, my mother blowing kisses as she always does,
because it frightens her when a hand isn't being used.
But for a change, my father didn't just stand there.
This time, he waved.

That's what I did, at the door to the taxi.
Like him, waved to disguise my hand's trembling.

This poem bears the mordant title "Terminal Resemblance." But it is clear that the resemblance includes a tense mutual attachment that has been put away in a low-pressure area to keep from shattering. Glück is her father's daughter in already knowing—and requiring—so much separation that death cannot be an outrage. But that doesn't make it speakable, either. The poet is hardened to endure seasons of subtraction, when what goes away nonetheless forms a shadow-pool where a few syllables stop to drink.

The least soft of poets of both maternal and paternal lack, the two lacks most of us neither escape nor cure, Glück looks back on their fatalities, and histories, like a too brilliant moon held in orbit by what has not been concluded—by the trauma of separation itself. The mother, that seductive abyss in which an impossible demand plummets, that weltering paradise—this she rejects as if with the cry, "Not that death, the confused one!" So her father is necessary to her as the hero who goes before her into death, the unemotional one. She emulates paternal strength, Apollo, with every word, making it sting like iodine of light. With her self-denyingly mannerless manner, she is now writing English in its most purified form. She threads passion through pain as if it were a needle's eye, as if it were nothing to rage over but the site, after all, of a joining, the looping point of "time and intelligence" ("Children Coining Home from School").