false 76548 0374530742 9780374530747 308 33 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170894152m/76548.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76548.Averno_Poems 388727 Louise Glück 2467 223 3 1 false Thu May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 27 07:29:32 -0700 2008 Thu Jun 19 12:55:11 -0700 2008
I've never been entirely sure what to think of the work of Louise Gluck; Averno, however, has certainly tipped the balance into the “dislike” bucket. When she is good, she is very, very good; when she is bad, however, you get stuff like this:

“'You girls,' my mother said, 'should marry
someone like your father.'

That was one remark. Another was,
'There is no one like your father.'”
(“Prism”)

As pithy as the wisdom may be, the poetry is entirely absent. I'd expect this sort of thing in a run-of-the-mill memoir, not in a volume from a Pulitzer Prize-winner. On the other hand, as I said, when she's good, etc. Given a strong image and a slight difference in the way she works with repetition, she can craft some really great stuff:

“You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.”
(“Averno”)

I've added and subtracted a star from my rating of this book at least twenty times as I've mulled over how to review it, usually depending on which poem I happen to be contemplating at the time. While it's obviously a must for Gluck fans, those who are knew to her work should probably start somewhere else (the Pulitzer-winning The Wild Iris or her best [IMO] book, The House on Marshland). ***

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