SOURCE: "Mixed Bag," in Partisan Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Spring, 1969, pp. 306-15.

Boyers is an American educator and critic whose books include Selected Literary Essays of Robert Boyers (1977). In this review of Firstborn, he praises the craftsmanship of Glück's poetry while also voicing concerns about the melodrama and the lack of coherence that he detects in the volume.

Louise Glück is an extraordinarily meticulous craftsman whose poems give promise of a really remarkable career. Working with materials associated with the confessional tradition, but speaking in a variety of voices, she has created a body of work that is painful and shocking, but without sufficient coherence to justify the relentless evocations of violence that reverberate in so many of her pages. In a poem like "Thanksgiving," images of corruption and decay are marshaled, but we do not know why they must have anything to do with the...