(The publicity optimistically refers to the new style as “novelistic” but there is no novel here, only patches of long-windedness.) The lines are long, the poems sputtering on, sometimes for pages, until they finally run out of gas, as if they were the first drafts of a torpid afternoon. All these years that Glück has been writing her stark, emaciated verse, there has been an inner short-story writer itching to break out. “A Village Life” is a subversive departure for a poet used to meaning more than she can say. Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday’s truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer. Read a poet’s second or third book and you will see the style of his dotage. Poets, being creatures of routine, tend to settle into a style sometime in their 30s and plow those acres as if they’d been cleared by their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Louise Glück’s wary, pinch-mouthed poems have long represented the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse - starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from. Even before the unknown versifier of Isaiah, poets probably looked at a lush meadow and saw a graveyard.
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