'Glück 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 Publishers Weekly, 21st October 2005:
In a collection as good as her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992), Gluck gives the Persephone myth a staggering new meaning, casting that forlorn daughter as a soul caught in 'an argument between the mother and the lover.' Taken from Demeter, her possessive earth-goddess mother, and raped, kid-napped and wed by Hades, Persephone now faces the insatiable demands of both.
In 17 multi-part lyrics centered in her familiar quatrains, Gluck traces Persephone's arc from innocence to, unhappily, experience. "This is the light of autumn," she writes in 'October,' "not the light that says I am reborn."
Two poems entitled 'Persephone the Wanderer' flesh out her predicament ("What will you do / when it is your turn in the field with the god?") and the self-achieving responses ("you will forget everything: / those fields of ice will be / meadows of Elysium") that drive the book. In between, scenes from a contemporary life ('"You girls," my mother said, "should marry / someone like your father"') parallel the unfolding myth, with Demeter coming to reprsent the body's desire to remain unchanged, or untouched, by love or death. That it turned out to be impossible is just another of the dilemmas brilliantly and unflinching dramatised in this icy, intense book. Empathic and unforgiving, the voice that unifies Persephone's despondent homelessness, Demeter's rageful mothering and amd Hades's smitten jealousy is unique in recent poetry, and reveals the flawed humanity of the divine. Ilya Kaminsky, Libraryjournal.com, 15th December, 2005:
Poet Laureate Gluck's new work is not just heartbreaking, playful, mythical and lyric poetry of the highest order - it is visionary literature. The title poem (particularly its first section) is one of the best pieces Gluck - or, for that matter, anyone writing in English today - has produced; it will break your heart every time you read it but also affirm you in the toughest moments. Hundreds of teachers across the country (including this reviewer) will be sharing it with their students. Few American authors have written eloquently about old age, but Gluck, now in her sixties, does a splendid job ("I can finally say / long ago: it gives me considerable pleasure"), investigating matters of the soul ("I put the book aside. What is a soul?") as it finds itself within an increasingly frail body and yet remains unrepentant ("You dies when your spirit does. / Otherwise you live").
As with almost all Gluck's recent collections, this book is a single sequence, where the poems work together making a whole: an ageing soul's lyrical book of days. Once again, the author is obsessed with myth: this time she focuses on Persephone and the landscape of Averno, a small crater lake that the ancient Romans saw as the entrance to the underworld. But what makes this new collection so special is that its most successful poems combine two very different elements of her previous collections - the playful tone of Meadowlands and the illuminating moments of Vita Nova - that rarely coexist in poetry and have never before come together as smoothly and effortlessly in Gluck's own work as they do here. When Gluck takes a broader look, the scope can be truly epical; when she looks inward you can sometimes hear your own voice. And her tenderness is breathtaking ("to hear the quiet breathing that says / I am alive, that means also / you are alive, because you hear me". Strongly recommended for all poetry collections. Helen Farish, The Times Literary Supplement
The American poet Louise Gluck tells us that "Spiritual hunger has driven my work from the beginning". In the soul's quest for perfection, she casts the body as an obstacle or impasse: a stance which separates Gluck from those of her contemporaries who choose to celebrate the body's drives and desires. Her eleventh collection, Averno, is preoccupied with how these central terms - body, soul - may coexist; with the fate of a soul "shattered with the strain / of trying to belong to earth" and with the preparation for death itself: "I wake up thinking / you have to prepare".
Inevitably, given the nature of its concerns, Averno has its austere aspect, especially when the reader is implicated: lines such as "You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared", or "You're all of you living in a dream", embody the poet's vision of herself as seer or prophet. But her ambition for this current volume has been to accomodate within single lyrics surprising changes of tone. "These days", she writes, "I try to make a poem swerve, to move unexpectedly from the luminous to the comic or ironic to the ecstatic, with each turn completely convincing, completely full." It is this ambition and the control with which it is accomplished that make the eighteen interlinked poems in Averno so compelling.
Averno, a crater in Southern Italy, was regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. The title poem is in three parts, mirroring the speaker's bleak sketch of the passageway: "On one side, the soul wanders. / On the other, human beings living in fear. / In between, the pit of disappearance". The speaker, an old man, attempts to convey such insights to his adult children, without much success. "listen to the old one, talking about the spirit / because he can't remember anymore the word for chair." The "old one" thinks, "I remember the word for chair. / I want to say - I'm just not interested anymore" The poem continues in this vein with the children giving advice about drugs for depression, but then in a sudden swerve the speaker demands that the reader: "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". The literal command ("Think of it"), and the location of that fearless voice, are characteristic of this "scorched" poetic landscape.
It is important to say, however, that this voice, building as it does on that of The Seven Ages (2002), represents an age from which the speaker also derives satisfaction: "I can finally say / long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure". In an era when the ageing female subject is frequently disempowered, Gluck's authoritative stance is exemplary despite (or perhaps because of) the often troubling nature of its observations. Take her recasting the myth of Persephone, for example, to which four of the poems are devoted. Of her removal to the underworld, Persephone rejects the passivity of the term "abducted": "I offered myself, I wanted / to escape the body". And the grieving mother, Demeter, receives no sympathy:
What is she planning, seeking her daughter?
She is issuing
a warning whose implicit message is :
what are you doing outside my body?
- a message which asks the reader to rethink exactly whose body Persephone wished to be free of.
Long ago Gluck stated her preference for "the simplest vocabulary", and the language in Averno conforms to her severe principles. And yet there are lyrics here which match those of her Pulitzer Prizewinning The Wild Iris (1992) in their beauty and luminosity. It may seem perverse, but Hades, who has built a replica of earth for Persephone to ease her transition to the underworld, is given some of the most moving lines: "Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, / first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. / Then moon, the stars. Then no moon, no strs". Then in one of those brilliantly achieved swerves of tone, the blackest humour is fittingly enough reserved for the lord of the darkness:
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 neginning, more true. Averno is Louise Gluck's best book in at least ten years, perhaps her best since The Wild Iris (1992). Like almost all her books, it mixes curt fragments of autobiography, apothegmatic claims about disappointment and unfulfillment in human life generally, and analogies from familiar myth: in this case, the myth of Persephone, whose descent into Hades, and consequent winter (Italian 'averno'), the poet sets against (a) her own midlife fears about death, (b) her thoughts on the tenacious, frightening bonds between mothers and daughters, and (c) the story of a modern girl, an anti-Persephone of sorts, who - through carelessness or arson - burns a wheat field to ash.
These deflated lyric utterances possess the starkness of her other recent books (such as 1999's Vita Nova) but almost none of their self-pity, and none of their risky, apparently thin consolation. 'I thought my life was over,' Vita Nova concluded, 'then I moved to Cambridge,' that is, Cambridge, Massachusetts. No wonder Americans pay such high rent to live there.
Such responses, provoked whenever a poet does not quite transform her life into art, should not arise from Averno, which provokes astonishment, and perhaps a little fear, instead. In this book, when a life is over, it is truly over: 'these things we depend on,' the first poem says, 'they disappear. // What will the soul do for solace then?... Maybe just not being is simply enough, / hard as that is to imagine.'
Averno, like many retellings of Persephone's story, considers how hard we find it to leave any prior world (childhood, say, or youth, or parenthood) behind. Glucks retelling stands out for the nearly impersonal harshness with which she examines the actors, and especially Demeter, the grieving mother. 'The goddess of the earth / punishes the earth - this is / consistent with what we know of human behavior,' she concludes. Another poem advises: "the tale of Persephone... should be read / as an argument between the mother and the lover - / the daughter is just meat.' The closer we get, Gluck suspects, to the primal attachments - mother-daughter, wife-husband, lover-beloved - the less humane we are to one another, the more we cease to care what our 'partners' want.
Nor is that her only chilling claim. 'I remember the word for chair, / I want to say - I'm just not interested anymore.' So the title poem states: few poets save Plath have sounded so alienated, so depressed, so often, and rendered that alienation aesthetically interesting. Gluck's self-editing, her care that each line add (or subtract) something from the line before, sets her above her bevy of imitators. As with Alberto Giacometti, her closest analogue in the visual arts, Gluck's technique seems to have evolved out of her bleak, subtractive moods. Her happiest claims, her most attractive images, come in for grim treatment as soon as they appear. Look what she does to the agreeable melancholy in this succession of images: 'My childhood, closed to me forever, / turned gold like an autumn garden' (here it comes) 'mulched with a thick layer of salt marsh hay.'
Such effects notwithstanding, Gluck's usual sources of surprise and variety are not images but syntax, line shape, and tone: poems shift from vaunting defiance to curdled self-hate in the space of a single phrase. Gluck can also stake everything on the truth of her abstract utterances: 'It is true there is not enough beauty in the world. / It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. / Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.'
That candor owes something to Gluck's early and serious psychoanalysis, which (as she explained in an essay, collected in 1994's Proofs & Theories) served her almost as other writers have been served by universities. The psychoanalytic situation, of course, asks the analysand to say, without rehearsal, whatever seems most important, and identifies importance with hiddenness, shock, aggression, unfairness, with whatever emotions we usually conceal.
So does Gluck. What psychoanalysis does not do, what Gluck has used her lyric concision to do, is to judge those unfair, 'inappropriate,' self-revelations, and in doing so to give them shape, or shapes: as in the psychoanalytic series of sessions, organized into episodes and groups, Gluck's verse-paragraphs comprise sets and series, poems and groups of poems, sets within sets, such as the six-part, eleven-page poem 'October,' each part and no part apparently final.
These bleak sequences include an equally bleak view of the life course. Lives in most art works have, in Yeats' phrase, 'character isolated by a deed,' but lives in Gluck have no deeds, no moments of decision, only a remembered 'before' and a startled, stripped down 'after,' with 'the field parched, dry, / the deadness in place already.' In a poem called 'The Myth of Innocence,' Persephone realizes that neither an account in which she says '"I was abducted",' nor an account in which she says '"I offered myself... I willed this",' fits: the name for her life, for all lives, is neither victimhood nor heroic choice, but impersonal fate, which we can resent indefinitely, or else resign ourselves to living out.
Gluck's bracing transitions and her scary omissions, her sudden claims and terse rejoinders, will not please every reader, but what could? She has rejected most of the effects by which other poets depict life's attractions, or its distractions: 'Someone like me,' Gluck says, 'doesn't escape.' Even the oldest tradition of seasonal lyric contains, for her, misleading consolation: 'Spring will return, a dream / based on a falsehood: / that the dead return.' Is such an account of life incomplete? It is: it is also beautiful in itself, and it makes a startling corrective to the hopes embodied by almost everything else we are likely to read.
The original article can be found here.
