Averno

'Glück stands at the centre of time and speaks, not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul.'
Partisan Review

'Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain.'
Washington Post

Publishers Weekly, 21st October 2005:
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, kid-napped 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-achieving responses ("you will forget everything: / those fields of ice will be / 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 reprsent the body's desire to remain unchanged, or untouched, by love or death. That it turned out to be impossible is just another of the dilemmas brilliantly and unflinching dramatised in this icy, intense book. Empathic and unforgiving, the voice that unifies Persephone's despondent homelessness, Demeter's rageful mothering and amd Hades's smitten jealousy is unique in recent poetry, and reveals the flawed humanity of the divine.
Ilya Kaminsky, Libraryjournal.com, 15th December, 2005:
Poet Laureate Gluck's new work is not just heartbreaking, playful, mythical and lyric poetry of the highest order - it is visionary literature. The title poem (particularly its first section) is one of the best pieces Gluck - or, for that matter, anyone writing in English today - has produced; it will break your heart every time you read it but also affirm you in the toughest moments. Hundreds of teachers across the country (including this reviewer) will be sharing it with their students. Few American authors have written eloquently about old age, but Gluck, now in her sixties, does a splendid job ("I can finally say / long ago: it gives me considerable pleasure"), investigating matters of the soul ("I put the book aside. What is a soul?") as it finds itself within an increasingly frail body and yet remains unrepentant ("You dies when your spirit does. / Otherwise you live").
As with almost all Gluck's recent collections, this book is a single sequence, where the poems work together making a whole: an ageing soul's lyrical book of days. Once again, the author is obsessed with myth: this time she focuses on Persephone and the landscape of Averno, a small crater lake that the ancient Romans saw as the entrance to the underworld. But what makes this new collection so special is that its most successful poems combine two very different elements of her previous collections - the playful tone of Meadowlands and the illuminating moments of Vita Nova - that rarely coexist in poetry and have never before come together as smoothly and effortlessly in Gluck's own work as they do here. When Gluck takes a broader look, the scope can be truly epical; when she looks inward you can sometimes hear your own voice. And her tenderness is breathtaking ("to hear the quiet breathing that says / I am alive, that means also / you are alive, because you hear me". Strongly recommended for all poetry collections.
Helen Farish, The Times Literary Supplement
The American poet Louise Gluck tells us that "Spiritual hunger has driven my work from the beginning". In the soul's quest for perfection, she casts the body as an obstacle or impasse: a stance which separates Gluck from those of her contemporaries who choose to celebrate the body's drives and desires. Her eleventh collection, Averno, is preoccupied with how these central terms - body, soul - may coexist; with the fate of a soul "shattered with the strain / of trying to belong to earth" and with the preparation for death itself: "I wake up thinking / you have to prepare".
Inevitably, given the nature of its concerns, Averno has its austere aspect, especially when the reader is implicated: lines such as "You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared", or "You're all of you living in a dream", embody the poet's vision of herself as seer or prophet. But her ambition for this current volume has been to accomodate within single lyrics surprising changes of tone. "These days", she writes, "I try to make a poem swerve, to move unexpectedly from the luminous to the comic or ironic to the ecstatic, with each turn completely convincing, completely full." It is this ambition and the control with which it is accomplished that make the eighteen interlinked poems in Averno so compelling.
Averno, a crater in Southern Italy, was regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. The title poem is in three parts, mirroring the speaker's bleak sketch of the passageway: "On one side, the soul wanders. / On the other, human beings living in fear. / In between, the pit of disappearance". The speaker, an old man, attempts to convey such insights to his adult children, without much success. "listen to the old one, talking about the spirit / because he can't remember anymore the word for chair." The "old one" thinks, "I remember the word for chair. / I want to say - I'm just not interested anymore" The poem continues in this vein with the children giving advice about drugs for depression, but then in a sudden swerve the speaker demands that the reader: "Think of it: sixty years sitting in chairs. / And now the mortal spirit seeking so openly, so fearlessly -