SOURCE: Gilbert, Sandra M. “Looks of Memory and Desire.” Poetry 168, no. 5 (August 1996): 281-302.

In the following excerpt, Gilbert offers high praise for Plainwater and Glass, Irony and God, commenting on the recurring themes of memory and desire in both volumes.

As T. S. Eliot would probably have been the first to admit, memory and desire are not just troublesome by-products of April, the Waste Land's infamously “cruelest month”; they are also, every month of the year, the stuff of poetry. Arguably, indeed, contemporary American verse has for some decades now oscillated between these two poles, with memory shaping the retrospective narratives and meditations of, for example, “confessional” poetry, and desire framing the experimentations and estrangements of, say, “language” poetry. Of course it isn't possible to make absolute distinctions between two schools—poets of memory, on the one hand, and poets of desire, on the other. To point...