Shortly after reading the LRB piece on Louise Glück I opened the most recent Triquarterly to three Glück poems, two of which draw on the Persephone myth.

I don't respond well to retellings of myths.

That said, the LRB pointed out the directness-well-nigh-unto-harshness of some of Glück's work, and suddenly I was receptive to at least one quality I found. (Contrast that with Van Hallberg's comments on Bronk's plod, comments which go beyond pointing into praise. As yet unpersuasive.) Take these lines of Glück's, from the second of two poems titled "Persephone the Wanderer":

In grief, after the daughter dies,
the mother wanders the earth.
She is preparing her case;
like a politician
she remembers everything and admits
nothing.

She lifts that syntax from Oscar Wilde's remark about cynics, but the echo isn't so obtrusive as to throw me off. This stanza comes after some astute-sounding lines: "We have here/a mother and a cipher"; "The mother/is like a figure at a bus stop,/focused and mindless"; as well as a provocative sentence-stanza:

We begin to see here
the deep violence of the earth
whose hostility suggests
she has no wish
to continue as a source of life.

That's the first time in this poem Glück conflates Demeter with the earth -- until those lines, we've only seen her separate, circling the earth. She takes it further:

the daughter's body
doesn't exist, except
as a branch of the mother's body
that needs to be
reattached at any cost.

Where's my Piaget.

So what am I doing in this reading? I'm trying to understand whether my dissatisfaction with the poem comes from an ordinary feeling of being off to the side of the poem's concerns (mother-daughter attachment and loss), or whether it's something else.

Glück's language is superabstract. When sensuous details enter the poem, Glück (Demeter?) minimizes them: breezes are small and pestering, flowers are "idiot yellow." Yes, death is both abstract and as literal as it gets.

In the last three stanzas, the poem switches from the third person to the first:

I think I can remember
being dead. Many times, in winter,
I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
how can I endure the earth?

The severe diction of the first sentence also happens to fall in a totally natural (coff) rhythm of speech. But in the second sentence, the unnecessary apposite throws me -- why break "in winter" with the commas? I wouldn't call it artificial, but I would call it forced. After that I can't read approached and endure with any empathy -- any real physical feeling.

So I'm a somatizer. Sue me. The ending, which if it were even slightly sensuous might stand a chance at being sublime, she just plain punts: "those fields of ice will be/the meadows of Elysium." That may look great translated into French, but in English it's literary.

I wanted to like these poems. I didn't. I'll be reading more of her work as I find it.

UPDATE: Jonathan indicates Glück loses him with the less-than-fresh phrase, "wanders the earth." Fair enough.