Judging from her titles [in "Descending Figure"]—"Dedication to Hunger," "Lamentations," "World Breaking Apart"—we might expect Louise Glück's world to be replete with emotional excess. Yet something like the reverse is the case. She draws on the world of romance, where the deep wish becomes fact, but her poems are more often about various kinds frustrations: misunderstanding, absence, powerlessness. She says "everything fixed is marred," but she longs for the "need to perfect, / of which death is the mere byproduct." The objects of her world are stars, statues, swans, and children: Things that, while symbolizing changelessness, inevitably suggest the threat of loss….

Miss Glück's language seems partially starved, as if determined to register plainly a fullness that never appears, and yet her words inadvertently record their own diminishment. In her retelling of the Eden story, she describes the creator: "He was god, and a monster...