Underworlds

the image faded.

The poems track this astonishing eclipsing of the world and the mind; they follow consciousness sundered from its host body: "Then the music began, the lament of the soul/ watching the body vanish." These are poems of severe, albeit beautiful, renunciation: no affirmative epiphanies here. What revivification there is comes with a cost, a darkening: "The light has changed;/ middle C is tuned darker now."

The horizons for seeing, for hearing, for dwelling have changed: We are geared toward the adjective, the adverb, decisive shifts in verb tense. "Winter will end, spring will return./ The small pestering breezes/ that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers . . . ." These are poems obsessed with temporality, aging and the accompanying vertiginous change in perspective. As if anticipating her critics, the poet presents herself in the stunning title poem as an aged person whose children find her concerns tiresome:

The old people, they think --

this is what they always do:

talk about things no one can see

to cover up all the brain cells they're losing.

In her austerity and occasional declarative baldness, Gl?ck runs the risk of appearing as a vatic priestess, intoning bleak and gnomic truths in stark lines. Yet a mordant colloquial humor has always leavened her aesthetic, as in her terrifying yet touching portrait of a besotted Hades, who considers the sensual Persephone: "If you have one appetite, he thought,/ you have them all." In previous work, Gl?ck's mix of the contemporary and the archaic could occasionally seem forced -- as if everyday bourgeois tribulations were straining for world-historical importance. Here, as in her magnificent Meadowlands (1996), the fusion of ancient and modern is haunting and exhilarating. "Make it new," Ezra Pound said. She has.

When Homeric heroes are granted the rare privilege of seeing the gods face-to-face, the gods must first remove the mist from their eyes: In Greek epic, mortal vision -- human vision -- is by definition occluded. Whether deliberately or through brilliant poetic intuition, Gl?ck echoes that ancient trope: "I want to shout out/ the mist has cleared." It is as if she has written our collective epitaph, and not only that of herself as a poet: "A few years of fluency, and then/ the long silence." ?

Maureen N. McLane is a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University and the author of "Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species."