Averno

by Louise Glück

Overview

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present.

Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374604370
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.19(w) x 9.15(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Montpelier, Vermont.

Table of Contents

The night migrations 1

I

October 5

Persephone the wanderer 16

Prism 20

Crater lake 28

Echoes 29

Fugue 31

II

The evening star 39

Landscape 40

A myth of innocence 50

Archaic fragment 52

Blue rotunda 53

A myth of devotion 58

Averno 60

Omens 70

Telescope 71

Thrush 72

Persephone the wanderer 73

Notes 79

Editorial Reviews

Brilliant [poems of] complex, haunting power . . . Averno may be Glück's masterpiece. Certainly it demonstrates that she is writing at the peak of her powers.” —Nicholas Christopher, The New York Times Book Review

“Few poets can shoulder the weight of myth the way Glück does . . . The poems brilliantly display a poet's insight, a mother's warmth, and a mortal's empathy. There is wry humor, too, and, amid much that is dark, there are fragments of hope.” —The New Yorker

From the Publisher