Louise Glück

An eleventh collection of works by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer takes its inspiration from a small crater lake in southern Italy and is an extended lamentation that evaluates Averno's existence in a winter landscape and role as a doorway between worlds. Reprint.

Poems

Averno

ame 

How privileged you are, to be still passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you. Maestoso, doloroso: This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.

aybüke

that there is no point in knowing what you want

when it is your turn in the field with the god?

chris

Kendall McClain

Greek myth poetry !!! Yes yes yes!! This one hurt my feelings bad

Katarina

"He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true."

This was my first brush w/ Louise Glück's poetry, and it was really great. The topic of the abduction of Persephone has already been fodder for so many poems and other writings — enough that it can tend to be trite — yet, Glück managed to bring it back to life in a truly fresh and multidimensional way. The way she universalizes the various messages taken from the original myth and corresponds them to her own life or the lives of others is really emotional and heartbreaking. And her style is everything I like.

Highly recommended

Donald

There isn't a bad poem in the book. Glück is masterful.

Award-winning US poet laureate Louise Gluck presents this collection of poems."

Prashant Prasad

They say
there is a rift in the human soul 
which was not constructed to belong 
entirely to life
…
My soul 
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

Jeri

Jess Z

death nurse

weli 

Carolina Grajales 

enya

Shawn Liu

'Brilliant poems of complex, haunting power... Averno may be Glück's masterpiece' The New York Times Book Review An acclaimed collection from the Nobel prize-winning poet 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.

Averno Poems

Reviews

Highlights