SOURCE: '"Man Is Altogether Desire'?," in Salmagundi, Nos. 90-91, Spring-Summer, 1991, pp. 212-30.

In this review excerpt, Bedient discusses Glück's Ararat, finding the direct tone to be different than her previous volumes. Nonetheless, the critic finds the collection to be successful due to the precision and concentration of poems.

Desire has become the most commonplace of topics, and not only because, like the weather, it is always with us, but because it doesn't know what to make of itself now that its own gaudy theological and philosophical trappings have been emptied of gas, like giant passenger balloons, and cut into rectangles and put on the wall as abstract art.

What poets (the house experts on the subject) may now regret is that walking naked is all that's left to them. The Plotinian There, the Fall, millions of flaming swords drawn from the things of mighty Cherubim, the...