SOURCE: Frost, Elisabeth. “Disharmonies of Desire.” Women's Review of Books 14, no. 2 (November 1996): 24-5.

In the following review, Frost discusses the themes of desire and loss in Glass, Irony and God, calling the volume ambitious and “strikingly original.”

If love is among the themes women writers have traditionally embraced, outright passion is far riskier. But these three poets explore not fulfilled desire but spiritual and erotic absence—home life gone awry, prayers unanswered. Unweaving the fabric of the domestic, each one testifies to a profound disharmony between self and other that only the act of writing can quell.

Like much of Louise Glück's work, Meadowlands, the first volume since the poet won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, is rooted in the contests of love and power that permeate Greek myth. Here The Odyssey supplies the story. Like Ararat and The Wild Iris, Meadowlands is a sequence...