VITA NOVA

by Louise Gluck

Ecco Press

51 pp., $22

Anti-sexual and suicidal, female American poets often fall into the wrong hands. As teenagers we read Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and even Emily Dickinson with hungry self-identification, and then as teen angst recedes we discard them. In high school, I was assigned Plath at about the same time I discovered Tori Amos, and, like many, I clung onto both of them like a die hard indie fan. But then, growing up, realizing we demanded odd things of love, our parents and our world, we tend to brush off these brilliant-brave complainers as if their long struggles with and against masculinity, motherhood and the other arrangements of modern life were nothing bigger than our own childhood naivetes.

Louise Gluck seems to have mixed feelings about her own past as the author of poems like "Mock Orange," in which she wrote, "I hate them as I hate sex,/the man's mouth/sealing my mouth, the man's/ paralyzing body--."

Of course, this is a single poem, and Gluck has always been a complex poet. Yet her new book of poems, Vita Nova, presents a self-revision which suggests Gluck believes she has grown out of something. Vita Nova depicts reconciliation with personality sins: fear, dream, lying, fragmentation and women who do not regret their sexual falls but instead say to their lover, "Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;/you had only to look at me."

Gluck, then, does not scorn her old idealism; she simply recognizes it as a self-fulfilling dream, embracing it as part of her identity and her human need for happiness. She is not embarrassed if in the past she was foolish or hypocritical: in "Earthly Love" Gluck admits that she once avoided clear self-perception and claims, "And yet, within this deception,/true happiness occurred." In "Descent to the valley," she describes her old vision of life as an upward climb into light followed by a descent into uncertainty, and then states, "I have found it otherwise."

Oddly enough, Gluck maintains a cool, stony voice throughout--despite her pluralistic embraces. She recalls antiquity, speaking through Aeneas, Eurydice and Orpheus in various poems, yet her usage encloses the most tragic scenes in a modern living room. She retells: "In the end, Dido/summoned her ladies in waiting/that they might see/the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the fates." The phrase "In the end" dooms the stanza to almost blase speech, which is almost bucked by the phrase "that they might," until the stanza ends with the prepositional pile-up "inscribed for her by the fates." Flat language and idioms mixed with arch language and emplotment are characteristic of Gluck's voice, which, like too many contemporary authors, is often pretentiously down-to-earth.

If Gluck speaks to the Greeks without adopting their speech, she also eschews personal contract with her readers. Making copious use of the first person pronoun, Gluck nonetheless maintains distance. Although a good deal of Vita Nova is devoted to the regenerating power of memory, the memories recounted are usually slight images of rooms and smells. Gluck reveals herself largely through allegory and the retelling of myth, so that the presence of "I" throughout her book creates an atmosphere of polite poetics that never takes readers into themselves.

Furthermore, Gluck is quick to switch narratorial perspectives, writing call and answer poems in which she is only sometimes the subject. Her opening poem, "Vita Nova," begins, "You saved me, you should remember me." A plot and an addressee are suddenly implied and then dropped, and the poems that follow are similarly oblique.

Both the beginning and ending poems of Vita Nova are themselves titled "Vita Nova," bookending a sequence of 32 inter-locking poems. It is a deeply reinforced whole--one of the last poems likens grief to the dark wood of a lute, referencing and earlier poem, "Lute Song," in which Gluck discusses the construction of the "overwhelmingly beautiful" out of "terror or pain." All of the poems address the problem of a new life, and the more obscure ones benefit from their embedment in the Vita Nova sequence.

Gluck lavishes layer after layer upon her theme, but the poems themselves are hard to grasp. Usually jumping straight to the big abstract idea, as in "I am weary of the world's gifts, the world's/ stipulated limits," she fails to illustrate adequately her points or make the reader feel them. Poor in images, her unsentimental poems are easily forgotten. Her form, occasionally (seemingly arbitrarily) rhyming, of dull everyday speech does little to enhance her words. Although she completely penetrates and bursts the peephole perspective of sexual resentment and idealistic angst, her from seems to lag behind. It is clear but uninspiring; perhaps beautiful but not in a way that fits. Allusive and chronically understated, her images betray a lingering strain of bitterness. True, Gluck does not embrace the world without mediation, but her style feels like an homage to an emptiness that doesn't befit a poet who believes "true happiness" can occur "within this deception."