Averno
Publishing House: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Averno
‘Always nights I feel the ocean, biting at my life,â?� Louise Glück wrote in Firstborn (1968), her first volume of poetry. Ever since then, mortality has haunted her work, sex and death bound together ‘ often violently. In her much anthologized scorcher, ‘Mock Orange,â?� she wrote:
It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body ‘
In her latest book, Averno, she confronts these pretty spring flowers ‘ revisiting the myth of Persephone, in whose story sex and death became one through a violent rape and abduction. Every winter, Hades spirited away the daughter of Zeus and Demeter to the underworld ‘ and in response, the fields fell barren. In spring, she could return and the flowers bloomed in celebration.
This joint custody arrangement takes on a nearly spiritual cast in Averno, which unfolds in 18 lyrics. The poems have Glück’s typical short lines, their elegant rhythms. Few American poets can do so much with so little, as in ‘The Night Migrationsâ?�:
This is the moment when you see again
The red berries of the mountain ash
And in the dark sky
The birds’ night migrations
It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them ‘
these things we depend on,
they disappear.
One glimpse of the tangible world ‘ and then the second quatrain whisks it away. The poems in Averno stress this metaphysical pickpocketing over and over ‘ as if reminding us that this myth is not just Persephone’s, but ours too. No one gets to keep his or her body forever.
Glück can remind us of this unpleasant truth because she writes with oracular bottom to her voice ‘ she can borrow from mythology’s authority without appearing to inhabit it in drag. ‘`Didn’t` we plant the seeds,â?� she pleads, her voice overlapping with that of Persephone, whose mother was goddess of the harvest, ‘weren’t we necessary to the earth,/the vines, were they harvested?â?�
Some of the richest poems in this collection come during Glück’s tour through the underworld, as she meditates on death and the past, how imagination can string a footbridge between the two. ‘When I was still very young/my parents moved to a small valley/surrounded by mountains â?¦ From our kitchen garden/you could see the mountains/snow covered, even in summer.â?� Some youngsters might have been chilled by this glimpse of an eternal winter (in ‘Echoesâ?�), but not Glück: ‘I remember peace of a kind/ I never knew again.â?�
If Glück’s The Seven Ages looked mortality in the face, stared it down, this book tells the story of a woman making a separate peace. To do so Glück interrogates the myth of Persephone for falsehood and fractures. She muses on the meaning of the soul. The best poems in this book are not the long, almost meandering ones, but those which engage Persephone’s story with something personal at stake.
In ‘A Myth of Devotion,â?� Glück imagines Hades preparing the underworld for Persephone:
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.
And so, ‘spring will return, a dream/based on a falsehood:/that the dead return.â?� This is grim wisdom. But Averno feels made from experience, as though Glück has gone down to the underworld herself to confirm what we all know to be true.
This article appears in May 24-30, 2006.