Louise Gluck interweaves in this book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's Odyssey. Myth and modern life have a lot to teach each other in terms of irony and clarification. Penelope, Circe...

In an essay Louise Gluck says that every end of a book is for her a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off", in which she discerns the themes, habits and preoccupations of the previous volume as defining the tasks of the next. The First Five Boo...

Helen Vendler wrote in "The New Republic": "Louise Gluck is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional'...

The second collection of a major American poet. Of her previous collection of poems, "Firstborn", published in England in 1969, John Fuller wrote in The Listener: "Her words are alive and her perceptions have strength. This is a very genuine and enjo...