SOURCE: "The Unfinished Child: Contradictory Desire in Glück's Ararat," in New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1, Fall, 1991, pp. 216-23.

In the following review, Bond critiques Glück's fifth book, noting a shift in her use of mythology that illuminates the process through which myth achieves meaning; he concludes that these poems about personal and family history inform the notion of intimacy as crucial to the creative processes of mythology and of poetry.

Louise Glück's most recent book, Ararat, marks a new and sustained intimacy in her work, the persona of her poems returning to a personally inscribed past, a family circle, so as to offer, more than her other collections, the sense of a narrative whole. But the narrative comes to us in fragments, often jagged and self-contradictory, having a dissonant lyric intensity unsuited to the more modulated pacing of longer narrative structures...