SOURCE: Burt, Stephen. “The Nervous Rose.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4911 (16 May 1997): 25.

In the following review, Burt compares Glück's poetry in The Wild Iris to the poetry of Sylvia Plath, commenting on the psychological searching in the collection and the focus on spirituality.

The exceptional short poems in The Wild Iris describe a year in and around a garden—both Louise Glück's own garden, in Vermont, and an allegorical and general garden world. Plants speak poems named for them; Glück addresses a creator-God in seventeen poems called “Matins” or “Vespers”; in poems named for weather or seasons (“Clear Morning,” “September Twilight”), the God of the Garden responds. Glück's skeletal lines, with their unexpected stops, make her poems all gaps and essentials, full of what art books call “negative space.” Her garden itself is a cleared space, like a stage; it brings into play the oldest...