[R. S. Gwynn]

From Dan Chiasson's overview of Gluck's career (pardon the missing umlaut) in the November 11th New Yorker:

Anorexia seems to have been a clumsy early form of writing poetry, focussing exclusively, and therefore tragically, on form; [pscho]analysis, which replaced anorexia by describing it, would then be an improvement, except that it had no form--its truths were inert and abstract. Only in poery could the formal manifestations of insight be explored, a fact that she explores, in form, in a section of "Dedicaction to Hunger," from "Descending Fugure":

It begins quietly
in certain female children:
the fear of death, taking as its form
dedication to hunger,
because a woman's body
is a grave; it will accept
anything. I remember
lying in bed at night
touching the soft, digressive breasts,
touching, at fifteen,
the interfering flesh
that I would sacrifice
until the limbs were free
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt
what I feel now, aligning these words--
it is the same need to perfect,
of which death is the mere byproduct.

*****

While I can certainly understand the poem and its complaints, I can't make much of the critical analysis of it. Opinions?