Louise Glück’s compelling, slightly creepy new book, Faithful and Virtuous Night, is stuffed with morbid fantasies, cracked allegories, offbeat fairy tales, and parables with no name.1 The speaker, who might be called Glück/not-Glück (if the world of these tales is unstable, so is character), reveals everything while revealing nothing—the poems are a raw look at identity constructed on the fly, which is, after all, not very distant from the way ordinary criminals live. If we trust Freud, we’re all ordinary criminals.

Glück’s poems display, more than any poet since Plath and Lowell, the mental pressure of invention—they’re landmines waiting to be stepped on. The breathless concision and pinchpenny vocabulary that mark them as forms—her brand, in contemporary jargon—have at times proven more burden than blessing. The language is still nervous as a razor (I can’t think of any poet as good who takes less pleasure in words), but Glück has found a way to remove the trammels of speech. The slightly woozy voice seems impelled to speak, or perhaps not to stop.

You’re stepping on your father, my mother said,

and indeed I was standing exactly in the center

of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been

my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so.

You’re stepping on your father, she repeated,

louder this time, which began to be strange to me,

since she was dead herself; even the doctor had