[Boyers is an American educator and critic whose books include Selected Literary Essays of Robert Boyers (1977). In this review of Firstborn, he praises the craftsmanship of Glück's poetry while also voicing concerns about the melodrama and the lack of coherence that he detects in the volume.]

Louise Glück is an extraordinarily meticulous craftsman whose poems give promise of a really remarkable career. Working with materials associated with the confessional tradition, but speaking in a variety of voices, she has created a body of work that is painful and shocking, but without sufficient coherence to justify the relentless evocations of violence that reverberate in so many of her pages. In a poem like "Thanksgiving," images of corruption and decay are marshaled, but we do not know why they must have anything to do with the people in the poem…. [All] we can really explain is the poet's desire that her images and observations fit together. Here is the poem:

In every room, encircled by a name-
less Southern boy from Yale,
There was my younger sister singing a Fellini theme
And making phone calls
While the rest of us kept moving her discarded boots
Or sat and drank. Outside, in twenty-
nine degrees, a stray cat
Grazed in our driveway,
Seeking waste. It scratched the pail.
There were no other sounds.
Yet on and on the preparation of that vast consoling meal
Edged toward the stove. My mother
Had the skewers in her hands.
I watched her tucking skin
As though she missed her young, while bits of onion
Misted snow over the pronged death.

The echoes abound in this poetry. But echoes in the work of a young poet need not always be wholly assimilated if the poet is to achieve a voice of his own. A poem like "Grandmother In The Garden" is no less lovely and moving for the fact that it calls to mind a number of Jarrell's better poems, including one like "Next Day" from his final volume. Here is Miss Gluck's poem:

The grass below the willow
Of my daughter's wash is curled
With earthworms, and the world
Is measured into row on row
Of unspiced houses, painted to seem real.
The drugged Long Island summer sun drains
Pattern from those empty sleeves, beyond my grandson
Squealing in his pen. I have survived my life.
The yellow daylight lines the oak leaf
And the wire vines melt with the unchanged changes
Of the baby. My children have their husband's hands.
My husband's framed, propped bald as a baby on their pianos,
My tremendous man. I close my eyes. And all the clothes
I have thrown out come back to me, the hollows
Of my daughter's slips … they drift; I see the sheer
Summer cottons drift, equivalent to air.

The poise and serenity of this poem constitute a remarkable tribute to a poet so young, and the dense aural patterns are woven so casually that one cannot but wonder at this poet's mastery of her craft.

Miss Gluck is a poet of few themes, but these she develops with a ferocity that borders on obsession. She appears to write best when she is least herself, when she writes out of contexts which are relatively unfamiliar to her own experience, and which she need not invest with the accounterments of melodrama or terror in order to make them striking. The poems are often extremely lean, several cultivating a stenographic bluntness which owes more to Alan Dugan than to any of the woman poets I can think of. In fact, the more one thinks about the resemblance, the more one can identify Dugan as a presence behind these poems, especially in the many combinations of slang words and elaborate Latinisms, as in "Saturnalia": "Now northward some twobit / vercingetorix sharpens his will. A star / Is born. Caesar snores on his perch above the Senate."

What informs Dugan's verse, though, is a moral passion, an earnestness which is largely lacking in Miss Gluck's volume. Instead of moral passion we too often get melodrama, the forcing of images to yield more than they can or ought to yield. Situations are unambiguously awful; mothers become prototypical predators, husbands monomaniacal in their obsessions, lovers indistinguishable from pimps. Details accumulate inexorably, as if by an energy of their own, an energy in no way responsible to the shaping intelligence that presumably controls the poem. A pregnant woman, miserable about the imminent birth of her child, surveys her room as follows (in the poem "The Wound"): "The air stiffens to a crust. / From bed I watch / Clots of flies, crickets / Frisk and titter. Now / The weather is such grease. / All day I smell the roasts / Like presences." The evocations are so patently horrible that one is inclined to dismiss them as the meanderings of a morbidly diseased psyche, and it is virtually inconceivable that any serious reader will sympathize with such a vision, for we are given no opportunity to understand why the speaker should see her world from the perspective that is developed in the poem. In a sense it is possible to say that neurosis is here exploited for itself, because its manifestations are bizarre and exotic. Miss Gluck would do well to cultivate the unusual capacity for compassion she demonstrates in her successful poems, among them "Returning a Lost Child," "The Game" and "Letter From Our Man in Blossomtime." On the basis of these we can safely predict a distinguished career. For those who have lamented the laxness and mediocrity of most recent work by younger practitioners, Firstborn ought to constitute a most encouraging sign.