Book Report: Averno by Louise Gluck

Averno: Torgo approves

Here's the thing about Louise Gluck. I think they named her U.S. Poet Laureate a few years back just because they were worried about her. She spends a lot of time dissecting Greek and Roman myths and thinking about death. I'm not a clinical psychologist, but I wouldn't invite Gluck to a party to lighten the mood.

If I was making the case for her depression, I'd cite lines like these:

"It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it."

"You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared."

"I no longer care
what sound it makes

when I was silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is--

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth
safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds,
weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?"

Ok, lots of red flags there.

If you step back, she's taking the story of Persephone, Hades and Demeter, using it to explore rape, sex, and love (in that order, more or less) as the turning point from girl to woman, and the beginning of death, which is always symbolized by winter.

The NY Times review gets credit for throwing out the word "chthonic," which is applicable, fun to say, and difficult to spell, but that review is too gushing. It's a good book, no doubt. I appreciate this more than other Gluck books (though perhaps that just comes with age). But it's not a book you go raving about. It's a book you appreciate for its beauty, its misery, its thoughtful construction.

I read the final 20 pages or so last night while the boy was in the bath. He was there giggling and playing with toys. I was reading about one of the bleakest stories in a tradition not rich in comedies. I don't think he was a big fan. At one point, he began pulling the stopper in the tub. He does that often, but last night he was trying to get out of hearing the rest of the book.

I think Gluck is best appreciated on the page, read alone, but definitely with friends not too far away. I hope she has some. I have a picture of her with Robert Pinsky. I hope he's not her only friend b/c he's kind of a downer, too.

I'll end with a quote that's less bleak (from "Persephone the Wanderer"):

In the second version, Persephone
is dead. She dies, her mother grieves--
problems of sexuality need not
trouble us here.

Compulsively, in grief, Demeter
circles the earth. We don't expect to know
what Persephone is doing.
She is dead, the dead are mysteries.

We have here
a mother and a cipher: this is
accurate to the experience
of the mother as

she looks into the infant's face. She thinks:
I remember when you didn't exist. The infant
is puzzled; later, the child's opinion is
she has always existed, just as

her mother has always existed
in her present form. Her mother
is like a figure at a bus stop,
an audience for the bus's arrival. Before that,
she was the bus, a temporary
home or convenience.


It goes on, but geez, that's a lot to type.