[In Firstborn, Louise Glück's] poems are brief and terse; her diction is like a clenched fist, or a muscle-cramp. Her poetic world is an externalization of intense inner experience, and instead of the wholeness of nature, she impresses on us, over and over, the trauma of being alive, of feeling anything at all. Her poems are a succession of shocks, and it doesn't particularly matter whether the specific piece is autobiographical or not. Miss Glück mixes the autobiographical and the persona poem, but both of them come out as "I" poems and are powered by the same painful charge. She is working out for herself an idiom which is interesting and recognizable and will, I imagine, become even more personal in the future. That it is firm, tough, jerky, and often understated is not remarkable in a time when firm, tough, jerky, and understated writing is...