Averno: Poems

Book Description

Averno is a small crater lake in southern, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence.Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In a collection as good as her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992), Glück 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, kidnapped and wed by Hades, Persephone now faces the insatiable demands of both. In 17 multi-part lyrics centered in her familiar quatrains, Glück 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-deceiving responses ("you will forget everything:/ those fields of ice will be/ the 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 represent the body's desire to remain unchanged, or untouched, by love or death. That it turns out to be impossible is just another of the dilemmas brilliantly and unflinching dramatized in this icy, intense book. Empathic and unforgiving, the voice that unifies Persephone's despondent homelessness, Demeter's rageful mothering and Hades's smitten jealousy is unique in recent poetry, and reveals the flawed humanity of the divine. (Mar.) Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker Few poets can shoulder the weight of myth the way Glück does. Here, in eighteen linked poems, she rewrites the legend of Persephone, offering the girl respite from centuries of being "pawed over by scholars." For Glück, the myth is, ultimately, "an argument between the mother and the lover— / the daughter is just meat." Glück's language, grave and precise, gives Persephone an elegant home in which to grow up. "The girl who disappears from the pool / will never return. A woman will return." Never overwrought, the poems brilliantly display a poet's insight, a mother's warmth, and a mortal's empathy. There is wry humor, too (Hades debates naming Persephone's Hell "The New Hell"), and, amid much that is dark, there are fragments of hope. In "October" we meet a young girl, scared on the subway: "you are not alone, / the poem said, / in the dark tunnel." Copyright ® 2006 The New Yorker