The beauty of Louise Gluck's image-making and her icily lucid voice fascinate and repel. Her first books appeared under the sign of Plath, with less Tiggerish bounce and less chewy diction, but over eleven collections Gluck has stubbornly shape-shifted: from fragments of First-born (1968) to poems as single sentences; from family romance to meditative sequence; from an autobiographical 'I' to pronoun choices and personas, including flower personas (in the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning The Wild Iris). This variety makes her voice an elusive one. But with a single adjective, she can make a poem look lived in; her line breaks are surgical strikes.

A Village Life represents, not a tonal shift - Gluck's intense tone is constant - but a major style change, nonetheless, in the expansive clutter of its language: poems spill from page to page, lines crowded margin to margin. The incisiveness of Gluck's short lines suggests that the fuller lines, used a little unevenly here, could become a flexible tool, adaptable to a range of tones: flute but also string quartet.

Set in what appears to be a Mediterranean country, albeit one with thyme, rosemary and blueberries - New England in Provence - Village is generous in its praise of natural beauty: an Edenic world of fruits and vines that cedes, somewhat predictably, to wintry Calvinistic fallenness, as in 'Figs':

My mother made figs in wine -
Poached with cloves, sometimes a few peppercorns.
...
Here it's merciless, you can feel the world aging.
The grass turns dry, the gardens get full of weeds and slugs.

'Nothing remains of love,/only estrangement and hatred', 'Fatigue' pronounces; everywhere nothingness ('You ask the sea, what can you promise me / and it speaks the truth; it says erasure') trumps being. Reading Village, one thinks of other poets - Geoffrey Hill, for instance - who weigh beauty and degradation but, fending off closure, manage to keep the scales more tantalizingly balanced; and one longs for Gluck to complicate her 'truth'. ('Some lies are generous .. like the sun on a brick wall', one poem's speaker says, wistfully.) Polyphonic, and with diction that tends towards the symbolic, A Village Life offers us a semi-mythic place where, as in the tale of Persephone, every sensuous delight flips to disclose stark black and white. If only, one sighs, closing the book, Demeter could now and then have the last word.