Louise Glück has become our Persephone of quiet hurt and bruised longing. When she says, with professional sorrow, “I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way,” you know she’d rather be one of Ovid’s heifers or laurel trees, punished for being loved by a god. In Vita Nova (1996) and Meadowlands (1999), she used the classical world to underwrite the collapse of a marriage (a disturbing number of Homeric characters were eager to impersonate her). Glück has seen the myths behind modern love, seen them for the lies they are—and she’s glad they are lies.

A poet who writes a book called The Seven Ages [1] has been thinking about her past, not about As You Like It. Glück’s childhood at times shimmers like a folk tale (one that starts in the Black Forest and ends in the suburbs), a tale at the source of adult unhappiness. Freud long ago taught us to stare at the child for the angst of the adult, and his fairy tale is as persuasive as any recorded by Grimm (if Freud was wrong, many adults will have a lot of explaining to do). Looking back, Glück sees two bored little girls, herself and her sister, in the endless summer of childhood. They were living on an island, she says, and they sound marooned until you remember it’s Long Island.

Long Island. Terrible
storms off the Atlantic, summer rain
hitting the gray shingles. I watched
the copper