Brilliant poems of complex haunting power... Averno may be Glcks masterpiece The New York Times Book ReviewAn acclaimed collection from the Nobel prizewinning poetThis startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss by a mothers possessive grief an abducted girls equivocal memories a farmers lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding its sorrow textured by the poets luminous wit. Together the poems of Averno swell to a staggeringly powerful lamentation through which the reader glimpses the ecstasy of the inevitable only to find it resisted by the insistent impersonal presence of the Earth.