Descending Figure is a considerable advance on Glück's previous work. It is spare, exact, mysterious; it has a rhetorical elegance and control, and a new emotional power both reinforce, that mark it as one of the year's outstanding books. Glück has stripped her poems of exposition's local colors, of pretension, of any comfortable effects of melodrama or moralizing. She starts with a few givens—a lake, a house, some trees, a table and bed, a lover or child—and uncovers the ordinary's buried life. As her title predicts, it is her figures of speech that descend to these ghostly encounters—as when, at the end of "The Fear of Burial," a spirit has left its dead body and the poem hovers over the corpse still lying in a field…. The genuine pathos of … [this poem] derives as much from its having taken up a powerful traditional...