Faithful and Virtuous Night

Old poets never die. They just write about "entering the kingdom of death," as Glück, former winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, calls it. In the poet's latest collection, aging is a cerebral place where the poet remembers her childhood years and connects them to the present. The title poem is memoirlike, describing halcyon (and not so halcyon) days with an older brother and later with a younger sibling. Other pieces suggest that for the poet, adventures are in the past, including her experiences as a writer. The best poems here allude to the state of the soul—"How deep it goes, this soul,/ like a child in a department store,/ seeking its mother." Glück's imagery is muted but remains strong. Her voice still has its incantatory rhythms and hypnotic effects, but gone is the vivid metaphor and bright crisp style of the poems (with their sense of overhearing the pronouncements of a Greek chorus) found in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris.