In the fifteen poems and sequences in Louise Gluck's rapt new collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective, speaker and the reader seem to move, or be moved, in the same channel, their agency suspended as each poem proceeds. The consciousness is looking away from itself and in this looking away it reveals itself most truly, in the hopes (which do not seem illusory) that a story seeds and in the distresses (which might have been avoidable) that it encounters. In 'A Children's Story', we are in a real fairy tale, one in which the girls are princesses capable of so much and yet incapable also, apparently free and yet subject, subjected. 'Everything has ended,' the poem called 'The Sentence' begins, 'And if that is the case / there is no point in beginning / so much as a sentence.' And yet, the poem, the poems continue, sustained as ever by Gluck's typically piercing, quizzical scrutinies. Cut adrift by lovers, teachers, without even, in one sequence, a passport which would free them to move on, the poems are marooned in particular circumstances, observing pasts on the point of vanishing, alert as ever to the daily cycles that persist, and considering a future to which time appears prepared to move on without its human subjects. The poems are staging posts in a visionary account of the human predicament, stories and fables whose isolation touches readers as the most intimate address.
