Averno
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a collection as good as her Pulitzer Prize winning The Wild Iris (1992), Gl ck 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, kidnapped and wed by Hades, Persephone now faces the insatiable demands of both. In 17 multi-part lyrics centered in her familiar quatrains, Gl ck 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-deceiving responses ("you will forget everything:/ those fields of ice will be/ the 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 represent the body's desire to remain unchanged, or untouched, by love or death. That it turns out to be impossible is just another of the dilemmas brilliantly and unflinching dramatized in this icy, intense book. Empathic and unforgiving, the voice that unifies Persephone's despondent homelessness, Demeter's rageful mothering and Hades's smitten jealousy is unique in recent poetry, and reveals the flawed humanity of the divine.
