Love and death, particularly the latter, are the recurring, indeed obsessive subjects in Glück's third book of poems ["Descending Figure".] With a strange mix of realism and fantasy, the poet evokes the fears of death and dying, the anxieties of love and sexual need. The scenes are typical—a father walking with his young daughter, a baby learning to speak, lovers awakening in a bright room—but the speech is extraordinary, plainspoken and strikingly metaphorical by turns, undefinably the poet's own. Cool, almost remote, the insistent voice calmly sets forth image after image from a stripped-down dreamscape whose placid surfaces belie regions tensed with suppressed emotions, desires, longings. Thus, however bleak the views of death seen from the many angles of memory, they are seldom boring. The reader, almost against his will, follows the course of Eros and Thanatos as it makes odd but oddly right turns...