This had been living on my shelves unread for a very long time. I did not love this one as well as The Wild Iris, but then, I have loved few poetry collections that well. This is Glück's first collection, and it is far more opaque than The Wild Iris, loosely narrative but filled with wild references that go unexplained. Still, I couldn't help but feel very fond of Glück, the people in these poems, this collection, for reasons I can't always explain. ( )

I picked this up for $1 from a remainder table in a bookstore sometime in the seventies. I'd dipped in it over the years, but now (post-Nobel) read it cover to cover for the first time. It's amazing how assured her voice is right at the start (well, okay, vague echoes of Plath and Sexton, but there is a strong new voice here as well). Fittingly for the title, many of the poems touch on pregnancy and birth (although there are hints of a child given up for adoption in one poem, and abortion in a few others), others evoke the relationship of a firstborn to her or his parents.
Other poems share a nautical theme, set not only in the Long Island the author grew up in, but many on the Massachusetts coast, plus at least one in Hatteras. Many of these seascapes echo the birth and death themes of the other group of poems, giving a strong unity to the collection.
All in all, there is a mood of broken relationships here, whether by estrangement or death.
The technique is opaque: her enjambments don't only run from one line to the next, but even across stanzas, and she often drops pronouns and auxiliary verbs. The result is that these poems demand rereading. I'm glad I finally gave this book the attention it deserves. ( )

First edition of Gluck's first book. Big, ambitious ideas. She signed it for me when I audited her first poetry workshop the winter of 1971 at Goddard College. ( )