Averno

by Louise Glück

Overview

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, 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 present.

Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374530747
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/06/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	431,160
Product dimensions:	8.04(w) x 5.48(h) x 0.29(d)

About the Author

Louise Glück is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a collection of essays. Her many awards include the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2015 National Humanities Medal, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the 2014 National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the 2001 Bollingen Prize, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems: 1962-2012, and the 2008 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

The Night Migrations     1
I
October     5
Persephone the Wanderer     16
Prism     20
Crater Lake     28
Echoes     29
Fugue     31
II
The Evening Star     39
Landscape     40
A Myth of Innocence     50
Archaic Fragment     52
Blue Rotunda     53
A Myth of Devotion     58
Averno     60
Omens     70
Telescope     71
Thrush     72
Persephone the Wanderer     73
Notes     79

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant [poems of] complex, haunting power . . . Averno may be Glück's masterpiece. Certainly it demonstrates that she is writing at the peak of her powers." --Nicholas Christopher, The New York Times Book Review

"Few poets can shoulder the weight of myth the way Glück does . . . The poems brilliantly display a poet's insight, a mother's warmth, and a mortal's empathy. There is wry humor, too, and, amid much that is dark, there are fragments of hope." --The New Yorker

From the Publisher

In a collection as good as her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992), Gluck 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, Gluck 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 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In the quietly assured voice one would expect of a Pulitzer Prize winner (for Wild Iris), Glück refreshes the myth of Persephone. No fancy language here, just absolute precision-the world "bleached, like a negative; the light passed/ directly through it"-that captures contemporary anguish in an ancient and enduring frame. (LJ12/05)

—Barbara Hoffert

Library Journal