Publishers Weekly, 21st October 2005:

In a collection as good as her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992), Gluck gives the Persephone myth a staggering new meaning, casting that forlorn daughter as a soul caught in 'an argument between the mother and the lover.' Taken from Demeter, her possessive earth-goddess mother, and raped, kid-napped and wed by Hades, Persephone now faces the insatiable demands of both.

In 17 multi-part lyrics centered in her familiar quatrains, Gluck traces Persephone's arc from innocence to, unhappily, experience. "This is the light of autumn," she writes in 'October,' "not the light that says I am reborn."

Two poems entitled 'Persephone the Wanderer' flesh out her predicament ("What will you do / when it is your turn in the field with the god?") and the self-achieving responses ("you will forget everything: / those fields of ice will be / meadows of Elysium") that drive the book. In between, scenes from a contemporary life ('"You girls," my mother said, "should marry / someone like your father"') parallel the unfolding myth, with Demeter coming to reprsent the body's desire to remain unchanged, or untouched, by love or death. That it turned out to be impossible is just another of the dilemmas brilliantly and unflinching dramatised in this icy, intense book. Empathic and unforgiving, the voice that unifies Persephone's despondent homelessness, Demeter's rageful mothering and amd Hades's smitten jealousy is unique in recent poetry, and reveals the flawed humanity of the divine.