Averno
by Louise Glück
Douglas & McIntyre
80 pages
$15

I first discovered the writings of Louise Glück while summering in Maine over a decade ago. I remember the moment because it was the first time that a contemporary poet literally had me spellbound—even before I’d gotten the book out of the bookstore. Her ability to strike up that necessary balance between vision and craft, and deliver it with elegance and restraint seemed remarkably effortless. It is not surprising that the poet herself once revealed a soft spot for poems that seemed “small on the page but that swelled in the mind.” The book that sold me was The Wild Iris, an extended meditation on a year in the life of a northern New England garden, which landed her, deservedly, the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. The former Poet Laureate of the United States, Glück has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bollingen Prize, and teaches at Yale University.

Averno, her tenth volume, takes its name from a volcanic crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Of course, it also resonates with the Italian “iverno,” (for winter) which, in figurative language, signifies the end of life. Aptly, the season showcased in this collection is winter.

Drafted with technical precision in a spare, deceptively-simple language, each of the individual self-contained poems also stand together as a narrative sequence fuelled, in part, by a powerful retelling of the Persephone myth, one which pits selfish Hades against the terrified, guilt-ridden girl who has been snatched from a sunlit meadow and banished to the underworld:

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

In Glück’s version, the story of Persephone, also an account of the difficulty of “letting go,” should be read “as an argument between the mother and the lover -- / the daughter is just meat.”

Averno is far more than the sum of its parts. Like her previous books, it also weaves autobiographical details with some dour commentary on the human condition: “Someone like me doesn’t escape. I think you sleep awhile, / then you descend into the terror of the next life…” Here she is in the title poem, demonstrating how art, how a line deftly turned, can transform despair and self-pity into resilience:

Think of it: sixty years sitting in chairs. And now the mortal spirit
seeking so openly, so fearlessly—

To raise the veil.
To see what you’re saying goodbye to.

Glück cuts to the quick of human suffering and disappointment with direct and disturbing candour. One of the most accomplished lyric poets writing today, she has not, however, delivered an easy book of lyric poems. This is a bleak and relentless exploration of some of our deepest human fears: loneliness, grief, aging. The end of love. Alienation and oblivion. It is, according to the book jacket, a blueprint of where we are now— the harrowing, enduring present. Sobering. Sombre.

Aesthetically, Gluck is a practitioner of eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, she once elaborated in an essay, exerts great power: “It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know.” Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening poem of Averno, in which the narrator laments the dearth of solace for a soul once the physical shell is gone, once it can no longer revel in the Beauty of this world – the red berries of the mountain ash and the birds’ night migrations:

I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

How to even ponder having no recourse, none whatsoever, to our vast treasure trove of sensory perception. To participate willingly in a perpetual state of zero. It is a haunting thought.


—Carolyn Marie Souaid’s chapbook, Flight, was published by Rubicon Press this spring.