Louise Glück is familiar to readers of contemporary American poetry. As early as her debut appearance in Paul Carroll's Young American Poets (1968), her work intimated a poet of consequence. There was something about the obvious technical facility and self-lacerating tone that was immediately engaging, not to say arresting. Her first book, Firstborn, initially published in the United States by the New American Library in 1968, substantiated that impression. In a review of the book, Robert Hass wrote that the poems were "hard, artful, and full of pain," characteristics of the poetic épistémé in which they were written.

True to its "confessional" sources, the poetry of Firstborn is, as Hass hints, formally strict, musically dense, and thematically elliptical, even obscure. But two poems, "The Egg" and "The Wound," set forth Glück's obsessive subject, abortion, and form a kind of thematic matrix for the book as a whole, focusing its somewhat blurred emphases. And those emphases, the recurring themes of emptiness, sterility and death, are powerfully reinforced by their juxtaposition with the plenitude, fertility, and vitality of the natural world or, one might say, the natural fertility of the physical world. Hence, in the presence of nature ("Ripe things sway in the light / Parts of plants, leaf / Fragments"), not the "gored roasts" or "plot / Of embryos," abortion seems unnatural, contra natura. Furthermore, what the poems insist in their oblique way is that one can never be done with something like abortion. What is seemingly dead, past, returns—as Freud knew—to haunt the present and future, obsessively alive. Such, at least, is the poetic premise of Firstborn.

It is a commonplace that every poet has his or her subject and, as readers, we grant them this. Yet in an art that has been dominated by male obsessions (what Foucault calls the discourse of power), Glück's subject is an uncommonly female one, even as the style and models of Firstborn are not. Herein lies the contradictory nature and ambiguous achievement of the book. This is not to say that Glück polemicizes her subject as, I think, Adrienne Rich has in recent books. Although "The Egg" and "The Wound" are not wholly successful artistically speaking because of the unresolved disjunction between verse and voice, they are still too rich and complex for the reductionism of "rightto-life" or "radical feminist" slogans. Glück is not intent to teach, but to present. And what is presented—sometimes coolly, sometimes fiercely, always forcefully—is not easily dismissed. Which is simply to say that Glück is not a proselytizer but a poet, and an accomplished one at that.

Glück has, as they say, learned her craft. In fact, much of the abiding interest of Firstborn resides in the tension between her subject and her means, her particular voice and the vigorous pull of tradition. One can detect the influence of Berryman and Sexton, though her primary models are Lowell and Plath: specifically, the Lowell of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964) and the Plath of The Colossus (1960) and Ariel (1961). For instance, the beginning of "The Lady in the Shingle," with its querulous tone and mixed diction, slant-rhymes and involuted syntax, sounds remarkably like Lowell's "Water," the first poem of For the Union Dead:

Cloistered as the snail and conch
In Edgartown where the Atlantic
Rises to deposit junk
On plush, extensive sand and the pedantic

Meet for tea, amid brouhaha
I have managed this peripheral still,
Wading just steps below
The piles of overkill:

Jellyfish. But I have seen
The slick return of one that oozed back
On a breaker. Marketable sheen.
The stuffed hotel …

On the other hand, Plath's influence, unlike Lowell's, is less explicit. Outside of tone and some imagery (e.g., the ubiquitous skulls and bald babies), it is most obvious in Glück's recourse throughout the book to epizeuxis, a favorite, almost signature device of Plath's.

However, and this is crucial, the dominant rhetorical figures of Firstborn (epizeuxis, catachresis, meiosis) are central to Glück's enterprise: respectively, in her "fastening upon" her subject again and again; her feeling that something has been "wrenched" out of the natural order; and her resolve to "understate" her subject because it is so emotionally charged. And yet, despite her preoccupation with abortion in all its literal and metaphorical senses, Glück is at her best when she weaves her poems out of a dim memory of life before the deluge, as in "Cotton-mouth Country," or when she finds her voice and subject by displacing it, as in "The Racer's Widow."

The latter poem, a fully realized lyric act that reveals a mastery of loose couplet form beyond mere apprenticeship, begins with a simple sentence, a characteristic gesture in her second book, The House on Marshland:

The elements have merged into solicitude.
Spasms of violets rise above the mud
And weed and soon the birds and ancients
Will be starting to arrive, bereaving points
South. But never mind. It is not painful to discuss
His death.

After a rationalization which "explains" why the speaker is able to discuss her husband's, the racer's, death ("I have been primed for this, / For separation, for so long"), the poem abruptly begins to re-enact it:

The loose, run-on sentences and sometimes violent enjambments (especially "his face assaults / Me," which has an almost tactile quality) mimic the speaker's involuntary recollection, and cathartic recreation, of the "scene of pathos." The poem in turn seduces the reader, as Kierkegaard said art should, into seeing the truth, beautifully captured in the concluding couplet: no one gets to keep his or her body, lovely or not.

Yet what is perhaps more intriguing for the reader familiar with Firstborn is how Glück manages at the same time to evade and confront her obsessive subject. In light of "The Egg" and "The Wound," "The Racer's Widow" elicits quite a different scene and reading. It is not too hard to see, cued by the presence of repetition—diacope this time ("let him finally let him go")—and remembering Freud's notion of "negation," that despite how long the speaker has been "primed" for her racerhusband's death, it is painful to speak; that the "separation" which an unnatural death produces does not mend as easily as she would wish. With a little imagination, it is possible to imagine Glück's true "scene of pathos" in Firstborn: "And see / How even [she] did not get to keep that lovely [baby]." This re-vision accounts for the hint of prophecy in the poem, the emphasis on "seeing," as if the speaker (mother) were somehow secretly liable for her husband's (child's) death. Truly, abortion widows a woman.

Finally, though family romance is a poetic matrix for Glück in Firstborn, as it is in The House on Marshland (see, for comparison, "Still Life"), the most moving moments in the book, outside of those in the second, "persona" section, occur when she is not voicing or confronting the other but her own self, deeply wounded but obstinately alive. In what is arguably the best poem in the book, "Cottonmouth Country," she is writing out of a place beyond pain and rage and despair, a place earned because built out of the slow, painful process of surviving:

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.
And there were other signs
That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us
By land: among the pines
An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss
Reared in the polluted air.
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.

If poems such as "The Racer's Widow," "Cottonmouth Country," and a formal tour de force, "Phenomenal Survival of Death in Nantucket," mark a poet of considerable talent at work in Firstborn, one not wholly subject to her poetic models, nonetheless the tone that pervades the book is so high-pitched that, finally, there is little of the quiet control that is often a sign of the mature poet. In a review of The House on Marshland, Calvin Bedient wrote in the Sewanee Review (Spring 1976):

Her earlier poems are tense performances, the light a little too strong, with Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Browning [evident in her frequent use of the dramatic monologue] noticeably coaxing from the wings. The poems are brilliant but lack resonance…. They suffer from a too-conscious subject and skill.

The House on Marshland however, is a major advance on its predecessor—brilliant and self-conscious as that book was—and evidence of an achieved poetic maturity. In poem after poem the subtle interweaving of myth and music produces an effect that can only be termed spellbinding. On its publication Stanley Kunitz wrote: "Those of us who have waited impatiently for Louise Glück's second book can rejoice that it confirms and augments the impression of a rare and high imagination." Yet that imagination, burdened by a difficult subject which seemed to necessitate a difficult style (or perhaps it was, as a Russian formalist or Glück herself might argue, vice versa), was occulted in Firstborn.

Reading The House on Marshland though, one senses that Glück could not have written the latter without the poetic travail of the former. The effect, evident from the very first poem of the book, "All Hallows," is a poetry liberated of its creator's designs (and, as Keats knew, of the reader's as well). It also makes possible a situation in which, to paraphrase Heidegger, poetry speaks us, author and reader alike. While implicitly criticizing the clipped style of her first book, Glück in a recent, illuminating interview (Columbia [Spring/Summer 1981]) credits the transformation to a change in technique.

Firstborn is full of those bullet-like phrases, the non-sentences. When I finished the poems in that book, it was clear to me that the thing I could not continue to do was make sentences like that. The earliest poems in The House on Marshland were responses to a dictum I made myself, to write poems that were, whenever possible, single sentences…. What it turned out to do was open up all kinds of subject matter that I had not had access to…. technical impositions precede change. I had become habituated to a mode of expression that was itself communicative of a certain state of mind and attitude. If you take that…. technique away, then by definition you are going to have something else…. The atmosphere of spontaneous deadedness will go. That was what I thought I was doing from Book 1 to Book 2.

Thus, as Glück notes, the terse voice and clotted verse of Firstborn give way to the off-hand tone and matter-of-fact rhythms of, say, "Pomegranate," a representative poem from The House on Marshland:

First he gave me
his heart. It was
red fruit containing
many seeds, the skin
leathery, unlikely.

The pomegranate or "grained apple," a persistent emblem in Glück's poetry (see, for example, "The Apple Trees," the last poem in the book from which the second section takes its title), alludes to the myth of Demeter and Peresphone. The "he" in the above stanza is Hades. In the Homeric Hymn, he steals Persephone from the upper world; however, when Demeter forces him to return her, he in turn forces Persephone to eat a pomegranate which will make her return to the underworld every year.

A smart poet, Glück twists the original:

I preferred
to starve, bearing
out my training.
Then he said Behold
how the world looks, minding
your mother. I
peered under his arm:
what had she done
with color and odor?

Because no one, mortal or immortal, will tell Demeter what has happened to Persephone, she "hides the seed" so that nothing on earth will grow until she sees her daughter again:

Whereupon he said Now there
is a woman who loves
with a vengeance, adding
Consider she is in her element:
the trees turning to her, whole
villages going under
although in hell
the bushes are still
burning with pomegranates.

Glück then twists the myth again, giving it a distinctly contemporary cast:

At which
he cut one open & began
to suck. When he looked up at last
it was to say My dear
you are your own
woman, finally, but examine
this grief your mother
parades over our heads
remembering
that she is one to whom
these depths were not offered.

A startling re-vision of the Homeric Hymn, this conclusion yields the fruit of both classical myth and contemporary moment, though the measure of compassion it conducts is more remarkable yet. The syntactical emphasis on the word "finally" has I think both a specific reference (the female personae of Firstborn) and a generic one ("women") which highlight the lacuna between mother and daughter, between two generations of women, one bound to tradition, one liberated. Persephone, who is finally "her own woman," represents the "new woman" while Demeter, every daughter's mother, represents the old.

All this sounds rather pedestrian, not to say pedantic, compared to the measured pace and shifting nuances of "Pomegranate" (though it should hint at the historical context and implication of such a poem). In fact, all the explicitly "mythical" poems of The House on Marshland ("Gretel in Darkness," "Jeanne d'Arc," "Abishag" and "Pomegranate") wear their learning lightly and this is what accounts, at least in part, for their grace and wit. This equipoise of talent and tradition in Glück's poetry reminds one of Marveil, that poet of consummate taste whose verse so effortlessly blends the classical and topical, the formal and colloquial (as, for example, in "The Nymph complaining for the death of her Fawn"); verse which betrays, according to Eliot's definition of wit, "a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace." Reading for instance the first few lines of "Pomegranate," one almost forgets the other grand poet and tradition they recollect. In the Vita Nuova, Love makes Beatrice eat Dante's heart; glossing this dream, Frank Kermode in his introduction to Eliot's Selected Prose observes that it "leaves the poet sad" and "represents an unrepeatable, irreversible experience of a kind that may be associated with love and poetry." And isn't this, finally, what Glück's "Pomegranate"—what, in fact, all her poetry—is about: the power of love and poetry, forces which can move the sun and all the stars?

If The House on Marshland is rooted in "the intimacies of the heart," its variable language and weather, it is also frequently "about" poetry, about how myth comes into being, as in the poised opening of "All Hallows," the première poem of the book:

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.

Reading these lines one somehow feels that there is more going on than meets the eye. Certainly, the poem acknowledges its "staging," the scene of production. Hence, the seemingly incidental presence of "cinquefoil" (a purple flower that grows on inland marshes), actually reflects the book in miniature, en abyme, like the infinitely-reflected image of the little girl with the umbrella on certain salt canisters. At the same time the first stanza of "All Hallows" is a set scene, a moment frozen for eternity as in a conventional landscape painting or stained-glass window. It is not surprising, then, that there is, as Helen Vendler suggests in a review-essay of The House on Marshland (New Republic [June 17, 1978]), a hint of the Nativity in the poem, a subject dear to Glück (cf. "Nativity Poem" and Eliotic "Magi").

I do not, however, think the Nativity is the dominant topic or trope of "All Hallows" since the title and the beginning of the second stanza precisely mark the time:

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 feeling of seasonal ritual and ceremony is conveyed here through a subtle manipulation of antithesis and syntactical parallelism. In fact, the entire poem is constructed out of balance and repetition which, together with assonance and epizeuxis (preferred figures of Firstborn), makes reading "All Hallows" such an unsettling experience. The effect is most evident in the enigmatic—I won't say "creepy"—conclusion where the tamped meter and vocalic play of long e's in the body of the poem are consummated in the final line, with its assonantal doubling ("creeps" / "tree") and reversed accent in the second foot. We feel the first tentative steps of the anima as, answering the numinous appeal of the speaker, it emerges out of its abode. The last line also in effect reproduces the emergence of the poem itself, its "assembling." In this sense, "All Hallows" is as much "about" poiêsis as anything else.

I have already limned how one might construe the self-reflexive character of the poem; no interpretation of it, though, can ignore its mythical aspect and still do adequate justice to its thematic complexity. "The Hallowe'en Fires" from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough provides, I think, a necessary gloss; it even suggests itself as a possible source. Allhallow Even or Hallowe'en, Frazer reminds us, is on the thirty-first of October, the day preceding All Saints' or Allhallows Day:

… when November opens, the harvest has long been reaped and garnered, the fields lie bare, the fruit trees are stripped, and even the yellow leaves are fast fluttering to the ground. Yet the first of May and the first of November mark turning points of the year in Europe; the one ushers in the genial heat and the rich vegetation of summer, the other heralds, if it does not share, the cold and barrenness of winter … [they] deeply concern the European herdsman, for it is on the approach of summer that he drives his cattle into the open to crop the fresh grass and it is on the approach of winter that he leads them back to the safety and shelter of the stall.

This provocatively "poetic" excerpt offers a context or "frame" (among others) for the mythical impulses of "All Hallows." In other words, it sheds light on the presence in the poem of the sleeping oxen and sheaf-harvested fields, the barren atmosphere and imminent approach of winter. It is even more useful to know that, according to Frazer, Hallowe'en conceals an "ancient pagan festival of the dead":

Hallowe'en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to winter, seems to have been of old the time of year when souls of the departed were supposed to revisit their old homes in order to warm themselves by the fire and to comfort themselves with the good cheer provided for them in the kitchen or the parlour of their affectionate folk.

Widening the focus of our reading, we see that "All Hallows" is not so much about an imminent birth (which is the subject of another poem from The House on Marshland titled, simply, "Poem") as it is about a lamentable death, a dead child. Accordingly, the implicit nostalgia of the above passage from The Golden Bough underscores the tone of the speaker's address at the end of the second stanza: "Come here / Come here, little one." As in "The Undertaking" where the speaker tells herself to "extend herself," the speaker of "All Hallows" extends her hand, offering the harvest seeds like gold coins to lure the hungry anima out of its heaven-tree, as if to repay it for its unfortunate death, for coming back into this world of birth and death and desire.

"All Hallows," finally, is not only about its own genesis but about poetic production in general, about the fears and anxiety that plague every poet; fear of sterility and the periods of barrenness, anxiety that no more poems will be forthcoming, that in the future there will be nothing to harvest. "To Autumn," Glück's unswerving address to Keats, makes this abundantly clear:

Fear and anxiety, this poem? Yet it seems to me that "To Autumn," despite or perhaps because of its light-hearted irony, is as much wish as prognosis, as much petition as prediction. Glück here envisions a future when a season not of "barrenness" or "pestilence" but of Keatsian cornucopia, a plentiful "harvest" of poems, will prevail.

However, in order to reap that harvest, she will in the future have to successfully manage two sometimes demonic impulses in her work: stasis and decoration. In their negative or perjorative aspects, they signify lack of dramatic tension and stylization respectively. Positively speaking, stasis can produce an aura about an object or scene so that it is as if its "blaze of being" had suddenly been disclosed. Thus some poems, and parts of poems, resemble stained-glass windows, highly-wrought, brightly-figured, emblazoned. And when Glück is aware of her decorative impulse, that is, turns it to her own purpose by bringing it into the full play of the poem, it can be an asset, as in the first stanza of "All Hallows" or the following stanza, or frieze, from "The Messengers":

And the deer—
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of sunlight.

Here the de-naturalized images are appropriate because the poem is about disembodiment, about a "wounded and dominant" being before whom the messengers come "like dead things, saddled with flesh." Similarly, the arrested presentation in "Still Life" is absolutely necessary for the poem's effect:

Father has his arm around Tereze.
She squints. My thumb
is in my mouth: my fifth autumn.
Near the copper beech
the spaniel dozes in the shadows.
No one of us does not avert his eyes.

Across the lawn, in full sun, my mother
stands behind her camera.

Stasis can also allow one to speak in a voice that, since it seems to come from the womb or the grave, the distant past or the realm of dreams, is sovereign, illustrative or, in Rilke's terms, angelic. It allows, finally, for a peculiar and powerful kind of poetic transcendence.

Decoration too can work as long as it does not pretend to substitute for what it is not. However, when it becomes mere decoration, too painterly, and when stasis becomes a form of petrifaction—when, that is, they are not integral to a particular poem's action, then they betray a lack of engagement on the part of the poet, feigned emotion or impoverishment of genuine feeling that can stop a reader cold. They can ruin an otherwise great poem. Bedient, for instance, notes that the '"panes of color' [are] too decorative for a poem nearly so great as 'The Apple Tress.'" And sometimes, even when stasis or decoration would seem to be appropriate, they work against a poem. Thus, in "The Shad-blow Tree," despite some fine writing, not enough of the poet's sensibility has been brought to bear for the poem to be successful. And there is ultimately something unsatisfying about "Departure," to cite another example:

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.

The concluding couplet verges on being facile and, therefore, unconvincing not simply because of the less than animated language ("breath of ashes") and commonplace trope (we know from Freud that trains, especially departing ones, represent death) but because it functions more as decoration than as a summation or amplification of the first stanza. Yet when cultivated, used with a certain amount of restraint, stasis and decoration can produce magnificent and magisterial verse, "music and legend," an image or instant of time seemingly caught once and for all.

Which is not to imply that The House on Marshland does not have its grand successes. An unqualified success, "Gretel in Darkness" beautifully illustrates how Glück transmutes her prima materia, in this instance the famous Grimm brothers' fairy-tale, "Hansel and Gretel." Their ordeal over (or seemingly so), Gretel is speaking:

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas.

The beginning of this poem is familiar, rhetorically speaking; as in "All Hallows," a simple declarative sentence sets the tone and scene. And at least in this first stanza, the poem is not incompatible with the original: the children, as at the end of "Hansel and Gretel," have completely vanquished their enemies, including their step-mother who persuaded their father to lose them in the woods. Good children who were not guilty of any wrong-doing, they have been properly rewarded: "All who would have seen [them] dead / Are dead." It would appear that there is a benevolent providence at work in the world, watching over the children, meting out justice.

But the dead, as Glück knows so well, do not die so easily. The past, "armed" with its terrible arsenal of memories, intrudes into and impinges on the present. The second stanza immediately announces a temporal shift:

Even though Gretel is safe at home and what she has had to do to survive is past, she is still haunted by memories of burning witches, bewitched women. Another common device of Firstborn, the rhetorical question ("Why do I not forget?") stresses the speaker's inability to forget what has happened. From the Grimm original—pun intended—we know Gretel had to kill, literally incinerate, a witch and figuratively "kill off" her step-mother before she was safe. Hence, she is a woman-killer and, since the witch and step-mother are surrogate mother-figures, she is guilty of matricide. Unfortunately:

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Like so many of Glück's anti-heroines, Gretel is alienated from her family, those who normally would, or should, comfort and protect her.

But what is her status in the poem? Is she a reliable narrator? Or obsessed, paranoid? Like numerous female personae in Glück's poetry, the speaker seems to be afraid that the man (or men) she lives with and depends on will leave her, alone and vulnerable to those who would do her harm. Perhaps, however, everything is okay "now," the children are safe and sound, and only Gretel is "mad" and, therefore, not to be trusted as a narrator? But setting aside this question for a moment, let me quote the third and final stanza:

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real,
real, the black forest and the fire in earnest.

So powerful and spell-binding is this conclusion that it arrests any questions about the speaker's reliability just as it suspends distinctions between "dream" and "reality," "truth" and "obsession." A "tale of deadly ill so quietly told," as Vendler notes of another poem, "Gretel in Darkness" forces our "assent rather than inquiry"; in other words, it convinces us of its reality, makes us believers. And it accomplishes this, as in "All Hallows," by its tone, a function of its consummate and compelling rhetoric. Hence, after the aposiopesis at the end of the second stanza where Gretel breaks off her discourse, her hallucinatory vision ("I see armed firs / the spires of that gleaming kiln—"), a rhetorical question follows ("Am I alone?") which reinforces the speaker's painful realization that her brother is absent ("you are not there"). The concluding three lines, dense with Glück's repertoire of rhetorical figures (apostrophe, consonance—sibilants especially, epizeuxis, etc.) accentuates Gretel's aloneness. Finally, the shift from the first-person singular that dominates the beginning of the poem to the first-person plural at the very end, together with the demonstratives and spondaic feel of the lines, all confirm the speaker's and our worst fears: the "black forest and the fire in earnest" are real, are out there still.

The final stanza, pervaded by an ominous atmosphere of impending doom, problematizes everything that has preceded: nothing is as simple as it seems (or as things would have us believe). Everything, for Gretel, is questionable now: her father (who, barring harm, also bars her escape), her brother (who might leave and therefore not be there to protect her), even her home, "this house" (which, I think we can safely say, is haunted). In "The Uncanny" Freud observed that many "people experience the feeling [of uncanniness] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead people, to the return of the dead…. Some languages in use today can only render the German expression 'an unheimlich house' by 'a haunted house.'" All of which accounts for the "unhomely" (unheimlich) effect of the poem, the uncanny feelings it evokes in us.

As in so much of Glück's poetry, we experience in "Gretel in Darkness" with terrible clarity the commonplace (which is not to say it is not true) that "we can never go home again." In this sense, the poem is one of experience, about irreversible loss (of innocence) and the costly wages of knowledge. Glück's achievement here is to take a story about children, a children's story, and expose its darker significance, its "adult" dimension, the terror and pity which make the originals the unforgettable stories they are and which later editors have glossed over, edited out, expurgated. "Gretel in Darkness," like the original Grimm stories, does not spare its readers: in Auden's terms, it creates a world of illusion that simultaneously disenchants us of those same illusions.

If, as Helen Vendler claims, Glück's poems "are far removed from the circumstantial poetry written by women poets in the last ten years," they also suffer occasionally from a lack of immediacy, a sense of humor or wit (where there is no lessening of intensity, as Eliot defined it) which would leaven her sometimes too deadly serious tone. Certainly Glück possesses, and is possessed by, a magisterial voice that has made for some astonishing poems. The danger is that it will produce mere magic, rhetoric devoid of the felt experiences of everyday life. This caveat, I suppose, accounts for some of the ambivalence I experienced after reading Glück's third and most recent book of poems, Descending Figure. At first glance, it merely seems to repeat the successes of The House on Marshland.

However, if Glück's tone and language have not changed appreciably (which readers familiar with her work might find vexing), Descending Figure does extend the emotional range of the first two books to accommodate events, one surmises, in the evolution of her personal life. Although still haunted by pain and loss and death, the poems are less obsessed with these topics and so less marked by a rather nostalgic desire for extinct states of being and non-being in general: the world of childhood innocence, the "absolute knowledge" of the womb and tomb. True, there are poems about dead children and deadlier male-female relationships, staples of the first two books, but there are also poems about the poet's husband and son, the domesticities of daily life and its small, though not insignificant, pains and pleasures.

"Happiness," a representative poem from Descending Figure, recognizes figures of feeling that Glück's earlier work did, and perhaps could, not admit of:

A man and woman lie on a white bed.
It is morning. I think
Soon they will waken.
On the bedside table is a vase
of lilies; sunlight
pools in their throats.

I watch him turn to her
as though to speak her name
but silently, deep in her mouth—
At the window ledge,
once, twice,
a bird calls.
And then she stirs; her body
fills with his breath.

I open my eyes; you are watching me.
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.

Here the intricate dream-like movement of the first stanza and the abrupt shift of gears that initiates the second are consummated in the beautiful but vaguely terrifying image of the last two lines. Though this poem has none of the regret or sorrow traditionally associated with the genre it echoes, the aubade, its relation to Glück's earlier poems, and their concern with the pain of separation, make "Happiness" the quietly powerful and complex poem it is.

Paradoxically, despite or because of its downward movement toward the things of this world, Descending Figure represents a slight upbeat impulse in Glück's poetry, one not perceptible perhaps to the general reader though one, more importantly, which two poets of pain and loss and death, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, never lived to see and write about. "I have survived my life," a speaker in Firstborn says. Louise Glück has survived, and Descending Figure is a small testament to her canny craft and courage. In the future, no doubt, her poems will not only continue to move and amaze us but reflect more and more those moments when, just as we are waiting on what Rilke calls a "rising happiness" (steigendes Glück), "a happy thing falls" (ein Glückliches fällt). Descending figures such as these are also the stuff of poetry.