Even before the unknown versifier of Isaiah, poets probably looked at a lush meadow and saw a graveyard. Louise Glück’s wary, pinch-mouthed poems have long represented the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse — starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.

Poets, being creatures of routine, tend to settle into a style sometime in their 30s and plow those acres as if they’d been cleared by their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Read a poet’s second or third book and you will see the style of his dotage. Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday’s truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose; and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer.

“A Village Life” is a subversive departure for a poet used to meaning more than she can say. All these years that Glück has been writing her stark, emaciated verse, there has been an inner short-story writer itching to break out. (The publicity optimistically refers to the new style as “novel­istic”; but there is no novel here, only patches of long-windedness.) The lines are long, the poems sputtering on, sometimes for pages, until they finally run out of gas, as if they were the first drafts of a torpid afternoon. Even so, there’s a faith in speech, as well as a generosity of instinct, apparent in these laggardly lines, though the reader may be forgiven for thinking that some charities are impositions.

As in Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology,” Glück uses the village as a convenient lens to examine the lives within, which counterpoint the memories of her life without. Unlike Masters, she writes without moralizing, though with the same steady knowledge that our destination is the grave (“To get born, your body makes a pact with death, / and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat”). Unfortunately, the quickest way to the mortuary is apparently marriage:

He has found someone else — not another person exactly,

but a self who despises intimacy, as though the privacy of marriage

is a door that two people shut together

and no one can get out alone, not the wife, not the husband,

so the heat gets trapped there until they suffocate,

as though they were living in a phone booth.