Some of Louise Glück’s titles suggest an affinity for the dominant tradition of European literature; consider The Shield of Achilles and Vita Nova (the latter of which recalls Dante’s Vita Nuova). Glück’s readers will also recall how the family drama of Homer’s Odyssey undergirds Meadowlands. The title of Glück’s most recent collection, The Seven Ages, invokes one of the ancient tropes according to which human life was divided up and understood from infancy to old age. The trope is probably most readily recognizable to readers of English as that which provides the structure of Jacques’ famous "All the world’s a stage" speech in Shakespeare’s As You like It, but the notion of the seven ages goes back to no less a figure than the second-century CE astronomer Ptolemy, and even earlier to a text at one time falsely attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. The title calls attention to Glück’s considerations of stages of human experience, and I take it that part of her purpose is to synthesize the quotidian with the classic, the grand sweep of history with the moments of everyday life.
          Often in these poems, the quotidian overshadows the gestures toward profundity, and often what I miss are precisely the kind of quotidian details that provide a poem with a sense of place, depth, and lived experience. Here is a representative passage:

Who can say my prayers were not heard? They were

translated, edited–and if certain
of the important words were left out or misunderstood, a crucial

article deleted, still they were taken in, studied like ancient texts.

("Ancient Texts")

An interesting if somewhat commonplace idea about language–that it is always partial, always on the move–emerges here, but more than a good idea is required to make a poem work well. No doubt the poem would benefit from more of the care about language that the poem takes as one of its subjects.
          Sometimes in reading this book, I feel that I have been made privy to the private journals of a very well-read and thoughtful person, and I think the poems sometimes suffer from the dashed-off quality of many a journal entry. In fact, one of the poems in The Seven Ages is entitled "From a Journal," and despite the title, the poem begins with some of the alacrity and panache that I appreciate in poems:

I had a lover once,
I had a lover twice,
easily three times I loved.
And in between
My heart reconstructed itself perfectly
like a worm.
And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.

With its engagingly jaunty rhythm and the image–redolent of the metaphysicals–of the heart reconstructing itself like a worm, the poem begins with great promise, but by the end of the passage just quoted, the language is beginning to slide into some prosy abstraction. Here are more lines from the same poem:

One cannot invent
a new form in
and old character. The letters I sent remained
immaculately ironic, aloof
yet forthright. Meanwhile, I was writing
different letters in my head,
some of which became poems.

The speaker is describing a relationship that has become distant even in its communiqués, a relationship whose distances lead to the compensations of poetry. But it seems to me that too much is withheld from the reader–not the disclosures of personal confession, but rather those of ironic aloofness, the kinds of verbal devices, gestures, and measures in terms of which strong poetry does much of its best work.
          With all of this said, I would be remiss were I to fail to advert to something else that occurs in Glück’s poems, the emergence at times of a voice of some mysterious and quiet authority. This is a voice that does more than dwell with abstractions, it also confers personality on them:

The rapturous notes of an unendurable grief, of isolation and terror,
the nearly impossible to sustain slow phrases of the ascending figures–
they drifted out over the dark water
like an ecstasy. ("The Balcony")

There is an eerie grace to these ascending figures who drift "out over the dark water." It’s almost a scene from a Bergman film. The better of Glück’s poems combine this quiet authority with a sophistication that has resisted world-weariness, one that knows the long histories of grief and terror and yet is able to exclaim with Miranda, "O brave new world that has such people in’t." Something of this voice speaks in the volume’s title poem: "Earth was given to me in a dream / In a dream I possessed it." These are assertions uttered by a persona constantly getting her bearings in a constantly shifting world. Perhaps the poem in The Seven Ages that best illustrates this voice that I am trying to describe is "Civilization," which undertakes a brief history of the evolution of human consciousness: "It came to us very late: / perception of beauty, desire for knowledge. / And in great minds, the two often configured as one." In this mythic version of history, the act of speaking during the early days of intellectual commitment and concept formation is dangerous because it threatens the customary sense of the world by assigning "power to forces outside ourselves." Even though the persons who dared to speak were exiled from the human group, the "facts" that these speakers brought into articulation

                            were among us,
isolated and without pattern; they were among us,
shaping us –

Darkness. Here and there a few fires in doorways,
wind whipping around the corners of buildings –

Where were the silenced, who conceived these images?
In the dim light, finally summoned, resurrected.

Thus, the act of speaking changes the world of experience, and the martyrs of language are honored here for what they have spoken into existence, which is now woven into human life and consciousness. This is a myth whose charms show what Glück can do at her best, quietly speak into existence a grand vision of human struggle and possibility.