WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy
regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to
Louise Gluck's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is a gate or
passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their
reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation its long restless poems no less
spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation no less ravishing for
being savage grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or
departure but a diagram of where we are the harrowing enduring present. Averno is a 2006
National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
