Folk tales.

Louise Gluck has become our Persephone of quiet hurt and bruised longing. When she says, with professional sorrow, "I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way" you know she'd rather be one of Ovid's heifers or laurel trees, punished for being loved by a god. In Vita Nova (1996) and Meadowlands (1999), she used the classical world to underwrite the collapse of a marriage (a disturbing number of Homeric characters were eager to impersonate her). Gluck has seen the myths behind modern love, seen them for the lies they are--and she's glad they are lies.

A poet who writes a book called The Seven Ages(1) has been thinking about her past, not about As You Like It. Gluck's childhood at times shimmers like a folk tale (one that starts in the Black Forest and ends in the suburbs), a tale at the source of adult unhappiness. Freud long ago taught us to stare at the child for the angst of the adult, and his fairy tale is as persuasive as any recorded by Grimm (if Freud was wrong, many adults will have a lot of explaining to do). Looking back, Gluck sees two bored little girls, herself and her sister, in the endless summer of childhood. They were living on an island, she says, and they sound marooned until you remember it's Long Island.

 
   Long Island. Terrible storms off the Atlantic, summer rain hitting the gray 
   shingles. I watched the copper beech, the dark leaves turning a sort of 
   lacquered ebony. It seemed to be secure, as secure as the house. 

A sort of. Seemed to be. Gluck is wary of a noun's finality, cautious of an adjective's definition. She and her sister may be the only philosophers to work out a theory of perception based on the difference between fingernail polish wet in the bottle and dry on the nail. It's one of the cheeriest moments in this icy and eviscerated book.

Gluck's poems might have been spoken by one of the shades of Erebos, come to taste the blood offered by Odysseus. Her tone is full of the dead's bewildered sense of injustice, their wounded and angry conviction. Her solemn memories of childhood have as much foreboding as the mild suburbs can manage. It's hard for her to convince the reader she wasn't a pampered child with a taste for despair--she loves the adolescent hunger before knowledge, the ignorance we name innocence.

Gluck knows you have to be a masochist to read her (and many readers are--why else be readers?). "Why should my poems not imitate my life?" she asks, and she means they must be cold, attenuated, stunned as if struck by a hammer. "Why do I suffer?" she asks. "Why am I ignorant?" Such raw questions, written after the end of love, the end of eros, don't want answers--they revel in their long-suffering suffering.

Gluck's hatred of the lushness of metaphor, the sweetness of words, has thinned her poems to bare skeletons of prose. She reaches toward immensities as if choosing a laundry detergent.