Louise Glück’s new poems have the simplicity of fairy tales. Winter Recipes from the Collective is an ungainly title for a book of fifteen poems ghostly, spectral, and often attenuated. They’re apparently rough drafts for Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm brothers.1 The tales are told simply, acidly, with a psychological weight only a writer like Glück, who says so much by saying so little, could manage—or bear.

Day and night come

hand in hand like a boy and a girl

pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish

painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain,

then they fly away.

A “you” and “I” enter. The boy and girl return. Things happen. Nothing happens. These sneaky, daring little pieces hold out the promise of a completion that can never be complete, even when an ending is offered. Like fairy tales, they don’t say what they mean; they mean what they say—or don’t say. A monster always lurks behind the arras but never shows his face.

Glück has been masterful at refusing to bare her soul, always a good way to bare it. She has revealed the grotesque in the ordinary as well as that much rarer thing, the ordinary in the grotesque, while maintaining a demeanor that approaches absolute zero. If this is confessional poetry, it’s utterly alien to what Lowell and Plath and Berryman were doing—and what, in watered-down versions,