[Louise Gluck] combines the stripped-down, the imagistic, with a kind of splendor usually associated with the full-voiced masters….

[The title, Descending Figure] suggests both the descent to the dead and the descent from Eden or a Platonic pre-existence. And the theme of an almost suicidal recoil again the death inextricably entangled with life is explored throughout the book, both in personal contexts (mourning, anorexia) and in cosmic ones (a retelling of the first chapters of Genesis). This gives the book a scope and unity missing in Gluck's fine earlier collection, The House on Marshland. There are occasional lapses: sometimes Gluck … falls into banal psychologizing ("the need to hurt / binds you to your partner"); sometimes the poem's judgment seems grimmer than any provided context would justify ("Portland, 1968"). But at her best, Gluck reminds one of those early Renaissance painters she often alludes to: the gold leaf; the sparse, delicate...