Between Firstborn and her new book, Descending Figure, Glück published one other volume, The House on Marshland (1975), a book full of blazing little legends recalling Blake's realm of Generation, in which fertility degenerates into the rote grind of witless reproduction. Glück pictures that world as a place where "schools of spores circulate / behind the shades, drift through / gauze flutterings of vegetation". In characteristic fashion the mood of the opening poem of that book hovers between harvest and pestilence. Working in a symbolist mode, Glück cannot be pinned to a specific interpretation; childbirth appears to be the poem's subject, but other possible meanings radiate from it.

Among the most affecting poems in [Descending Figure] is "The Gift", cast in the form of a prayer for her son, who is "so little, so ignorant", and just beginning to talk. He stands at the screened door, crying "oggie...