ABSTRACT
I n her first collection, Louise Gluck writes, "such of my ownlives / I have cast off" ("Gemini," in Firstborn), and it is just such a sense of continual reinvention of identity and poetics that gives shape to her career. Because writing each volume has involved, according to the poet, this kind of self-conscious "casting off" -of syntax, of vocabulary, of themes, and of forms-each book is, in some ways if not entirely, distinct from the one preceding it.
