The New York Times says 'Glück takes up her own challenge, employing it to explore concepts like 'mind' and 'soul' with a fresh, often acidulous, perspective. Each part has five chapters.Īverno has frequently been referred to as a 'modern classic' due to its everlasting topics and themes.

The collection is divided into two parts. There are eighteen poems in the collection, and several are extended pieces with distinct, brief sections. Some reviewers praised Glück's non-resolution of these tensions. The Greek myth of Demeter's daughter Persephone and her marriage to Hades is a recurring topic in the collection, as are the themes of oblivion and death, soul and body, love and isolation. It was a National Book Award Finalist for Poetry that year.Īverno or Lake Avernus is a lake west of Naples that the Romans mythologized as the entrance to the underworld. And yet it felt true.” Composed largely of serial poems whose open-endedness charts the mind of a writer dispossessed of conclusions, Averno has the feeling of an urgent inner dialogue between the believer and the skeptic, the survivor and the analyst, the first person and the third.Averno is Louise Glück's tenth collection of poetry published in 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Snow began falling over the surface of the whole earth. To this end, each poem’s consolation rests in its existence as an exquisitely rendered, formal experience outside ordinary time, a notion for which the poem “Telescope” provides this analogy: while gazing up at the night sky, “You exist as the stars exist, / participating in their stillness”-until, that is, “you move your eye away” and realize “not that the image is false / but the relation is false.” Through Averno we come to see that Glück’s skepticism is not about poetry’s supreme fictions but about the relation between these fictions and the non-fictions of experience. But the one true change, Averno suggests with complete candor, has in fact already occurred-in its speakers’ sudden and traumatic matriculations from innocence to experience. Averno is an important collection in that it shows Glück struggling with certain givens, such as the supposed certainty of myths, or the hopeful premise that poetry represents the possibility of change.

In truth, Averno reminds us, a poet does not so much determine her themes as decide how to work through them. Readers familiar with Louise Glück’s work might consider the ordeal of Persephone an unsurprising or even predictable choice of thematic frames.

Averno by Louise Glück