SOURCE: Berger, Charles. Review of Ararat, by Louise Glück. Raritan 10, no. 3 (winter 1994): 119–33.

In the following review, Berger favorably reviews Ararat, commenting on the lyrical balance evident in the poetry and how the collection fits into the elegy genre.

Louise Glück's Ararat is a book-length sequence of short lyrics set in the year following the death of the poet's father. Book-length is a phrase I usually recoil from when attached to lyric sequences, since it often serves as a plea for excusing local weaknesses. But Ararat truly is a volume of linked poems, a volume operating through laws of accrual where no single poem dominates others or—more remarkably—needs to be salvaged by the work as a whole. One marks each individual poem as it comes along, records slight shifts of focus and form, even while registering a tonal similarity between poems striking enough to make...