SOURCE: Jackson, Richard. Review of Vita Nova, by Louise Glück. Prairie Schooner 75, no. 2 (summer 2000): 198–199.

In the following excerpt, Jackson asserts that Vita Nova “reverses expectations” for readers as it explores myth and everyday life.

The mythology in Louise Glück's Vita Nova is ostensibly more traditional, though she constantly intertwines the classic myths and the myths of our often failed lives. It is not surprising that in this book, following upon the book-length sequence (almost single poems with chapters) The Wild Iris and especially Meadowlands, and describing the breakdown of a relationship, uses the Orpheus-Eurydice myth (and the myth of Persephone in the distant background) as its central metaphor. What Glück does is revitalize these myths in our contemporary idiom, an act as much of interpretation as transformation. In an austere language she allows the mythic to fill in what the spare words suggest. The book...