Louise Gluck has long practiced poetry as a kind of intuitive vision. She began as Cassandra, from a distance, in alliance with the immortals. Reading her books sequentially is like mapping the transformations of her Orphic nature into an unwilling vehicle, reckless, mortal, and grounded. "The Seven Ages" is Gluck's ninth book, one of her strangest and certainly her boldest. In it—like William Blake's mystical Thel—she looks at her death and in doing so forces endless superimpositions of the possible upon the impossible. Her act simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable and is ultimately mimetic. Repeatedly, with each wild leap and transformation, the flames shoot up the reader's spine. In an essay she writes: "one of the revelations of art is the discovery of a tone or perspective at once completely unexpected and yet completely true to a set of materials." This truth to materials—language, circumstance, precursor—is the proof of a poem.

Pages: 68