Averno

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A widely revered collection from the Nobel prize-winning poet, publishing in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time This startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. Together, the poems of Averno swell to a staggeringly powerful lamentation, through which the reader glimpses the ecstasy of the inevitable, only to find it resisted by the insistent, impersonal presence of the Earth.

Reviews

Brilliant [poems of] complex, haunting power... Averno may be Glck's masterpiece. Certainly it demonstrates that she is writing at the peak of her powers. -- Nicholas Christopher * New York Times Book Review *
Few poets can shoulder the weight of the myth the way Glck does...The poems brilliantly display a poet's insight, a mother's warmth, and a mortal's empath. There is wry humour, too, and, amid much that is dark, there are fragments of hope. * New Yorker *
[An] intense and ambitious collection. * Guardian *
An important collection...Averno has the feeling of an urgent inner dialogue between the believer and the skeptic. * Boston Review *
An ageing soul's lyrical book of days ... The title poem will break your heart every time you read it but also affirm you in the toughest moments ... When Glck 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. -- Ilya Kaminsky * Library Journal *

Author Bio

Louise Gl ck is the author of twelve books of poems and two essay collections. Her many awards include the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and Stanford University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.