Customer Reviews

Averno: Poems

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can barely breathe. It's not because I'm a female in some kind of a swoon. It's because she never fails to tell the truth no matter how hard it might be to swallow. Also, most of the Master poets (among which Ms. Gluck surely is included) never, ever fail to tackle those dark, disturbing, complex places most of us refuse to even consider let alone pen as a work of art. As a result, this collection shines, literally, in the dark. I don't care if she uses an ancient mythic-metaphor that has been employed before. I don't care if some find it 'depressing.' But I very much care when a Masterpiece like this doesn't get the 5-star rating I believe it deserves. Ms. Gluck is among the most courageous poets worldwide. I'd say that puts her at the top of my list...exactly where she has always been.

Louise Glück is a radiant poet. She molds her words and phrases, meter and lines, message and thoughts as a master craftsman. This is her tenth collection of poems and for this reader it is her finest.

The title of the book is the title of the poem ensemble: Averno is a small crater in Italy believed by ancient Romans to be the opening in earth's crust that provided a path to the underworld. It is in this setting that Glück retells the myth of Persephone in eighteen poems in a manner that visits death, anguish, dark lamentations all in a way that makes each of the poems like the intricate complex of a Chinese puzzle.

While some poets are content to re-visit the classics, 'translating' them into contemporary language, Glück is not satisfied to plagiarize. Instead she takes the myth and transforms it into paths to introspection, raising artful questions and thoughts that she adamantly refuses to answer for us. It is the work of a genius poet. It is a treasure of a book. Grady Harp, December 06

Louise Gluck remains an elegant poet, able to evoke the mysteries of being crafted in the forms of gods while surviving our humanity. She is quick to capture our attention and lingers as we put her book aside in response to daily obligations.

Louise Gluck, Averno Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)

I've never been entirely sure what to think of the work of Louise Gluck; Averno, however, has certainly tipped the balance into the "dislike" bucket. When she is good, she is very, very good; when she is bad, however, you get stuff like this:

"'You girls,' my mother said, 'should marry
someone like your father.'

That was one remark. Another was,
'There is no one like your father.'"
("Prism")

As pithy as the wisdom may be, the poetry is entirely absent. I'd expect this sort of thing in a run-of-the-mill memoir, not in a volume from a Pulitzer Prize-winner. On the other hand, as I said, when she's good, etc. Given a strong image and a slight difference in the way she works with repetition, she can craft some really great stuff:

"You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return."
("Averno")

I've added and subtracted a star from my rating of this book at least twenty times as I've mulled over how to review it, usually depending on which poem I happen to be contemplating at the time. While it's obviously a must for Gluck fans, those who are knew to her work should probably start somewhere else (the Pulitzer-winning The Wild Iris or her best [IMO] book, The House on Marshland). ***

This is story-telling in poetry form, with all the layers squeezed into a few lines. I find myself browsing through it even during a coffee break because then I can REALLY get away, even if only for a quarter of an hour. At the same time, you learn so much about the craft here. I wish she would come to Europe and give a lecture on the mainland, for example in The Netherlands (ehem) where I live. Reading this book is like attending a master class of sorts. You get a lot of ideas and inspiration, and it certainly does a lot more than just entertain. The imagery, the metaphor (I especially appreciate how some of the 'easy' ones serve as a clue to the less obvious ones), the tone, the depth, the themes -- simply breathtaking. You won't read this book only to fall asleep. Instead, you'll end up staying awake to read some more.

As Louise Gluck reminds us, Averno is a small lake, famous for being the entrance to the underworld. Her notoriety as a poet who will spare nothing to achieve perfection takes another corner here, as she jumps from angle to angle all the while drinking in the sad, almost preternaturally pertinent life ( and afterlife ) of the demi-goddess Persephone who, as the daughter of Demeter, wound up sold down the river to pleasure Hades in return for allowing the eternal harvest to continue here on Earth.

Averno is not only a lake, but a crater, and thus the cold darkness of the moon, beyond which Pink Floyd could only sniff the nitrate, penetrates into Gluck's patented rhythms. She is cold here because her subject is cold. We all know the myth of Persephone, and perhaps it is an overworked subject, but Gluck manages to give it a bit of a refreshener course by showing us that the US incursion into Iraq is yet another byproduct of the ever poignant power brokerage between the forces of Demeter and the forces of hellfire. As she grows older, she realizes, she just doesn't care any more about the things that obsessed her as a young, lyric poet. And she must get tired of Anne Carson continually eclipsing her reputation with classical coverage all her own, with even more quirks than Gluck. But if so, she only shows an icy hauteur, for the young and healthy (and stupid), not only the students of Yale, where she sometimes teaches, but all of us who lack her enviable distance from feeling. The sheer perfection of her syllabics is daunting, but many have endured and came to a place where her yearning to be loved meets with a corresponding affection. "I want to say--I'm just not interested anymore./ /I wake up thinking/ you have to prepare./ Soon the spirits will give up--all the chairs in the world won't help you." This is a brief medley of lines from "Averno" itself, a poem in which a bit of Gluck's own personality squeaks through the rigidly constucted dramatic monologues she has created for Persephone to speak.

In "Archaic Fragment" (page 52 of my edition), syntax itself breaks down, as does the poet's unique ability to represent the obvious: "AIAIAIAI cried/ the naked mirror." When she started so many years ago, the poet AI was a rival. Now she is almost alone on Parnassus, except for pesky Anne Carson. "I want my heart back," she cries. "I want to feel everything again--" (Blue Rotunda," one of several rotund pieces here.) She is like Robert Browning, creating a social order out of a random, often violent, vision of anarchy. She wants to "see what you're saying goodbye to." Not for nothing is "NO" the last syllable of, --AVERNO.

The book "Averno" appeared almost immediately after I ordered it. The service was efficient and the packaging was secure.