Averno

Gluck Louise

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck's new collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is both passageway between worlds and an impassable barrier. The book proceeds as a sequence, an extended lamentation, its long restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resolution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage and grief-stricken.

About the Author

Louise Gluck, born in 1943, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. She has published eleven books of poetry and a book of essays on poetry, "Proofs and Theories" (1994). She teaches at Yale University as Writer in Residence and in the Creative Writing Program of Boston University. She was appointed the US Poet Laureate from 2003-2004.

Reviews

"Gluck stands at the centre of time and speaks, not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul" – Partisan Review

"Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain" – Washington Post

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