A review by gabrielrobartes
The First Five Books of Poems by Louise Glück

4.0

There are lovely lines, lovely individual moments in the first books. But The Triumph Of Achilles contains some plain-spoken meditations on death that pinch and prick and Ararat is the kind of text that reduces sibling relationships to rubble. The form ends up at a kind of plain-spoken version of Robert Hass et al (except she knows when to stop whereas Hass will just go on and on and on) but the message is chilling and brutal - to love in a family is to endure pain; death is all that awaits; human relationships are structured by the nature of their misunderstandings. These poems offer cold comfort but compellingly so.