A powerful re-seeing of family life animates many of the poems in The House on Marshland, down to its last poem, "The Apple Trees," spoken by a woman to a man who is leaving her; he is the father of her child. In a dream, she holds the child up to him, saying, "See what you have made."… As a mother's view of her child, this is unnerving: she sees him as artifact and X-ray plate, with the dispassionate eye of a woodcarver or a radiologist.

In that dispassionate eye so stiffened against the distortions love, Glück exerts a clear sovereignty that attracts assent rather than inquiry. (p. 304)

[There] is something "disembodied, triumphant, dead"—Whitman's words—about Glück's usual voice…. She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope, transparently removed in space or time. It is this removal which...