“Always nights I feel the ocean, biting at my life,” Louis Gluck wrote in “Firstborn” (1968), her debut volume of poetry. Since then, mortality has haunted her work, sex and death bound together – often violently. In her much anthologized scorcher, “Mock Orange,” she wrote:
It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body –
In her latest book, “Averno,” she confronts these pretty spring flowers, revisiting the myth of Persephone, in whose story sex and death became one through a violent rape and abduction. Every winter, the story went, Hades spirited away the daughter of Zeus and Demeter to the underworld and in response, the fields fell barren. In spring, she could return and the flowers bloomed in celebration.
“Averno” unfolds in 18 lyrics. The poems have Gluck’s typical short line, their elegant rhythms. Few American poets can do so much with so little, as in “The Night Migrations”:
This is the moment when you see again
The red berries of the mountain ash
And in the dark sky
The birds’ night migrations
It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them –
these things we depend on,
they disappear.
One glimpse of the tangible world – and then the second quatrain whisks it away. The poems in Averno repeat this metaphysical pickpocketing, over and over again, as if reminding us that this myth is not just Persephone’s, but ours too. No one gets to keep his or her body forever.
Gluck can remind us of this unpleasant truth because she writes with oracular bottom to her voice – she can borrow from mythology’s authority without appearing to inhabit it in drag. “(Didn’t) we plant the seeds,” she pleads, her voice overlapping with that of Persephone, whose mother was goddess of the harvest, “weren’t we necessary to the earth,/the vines, were they harvested?”
Some of the richest poems in this collection come during Gluck’s tour through the underworld, as she meditates on death and the past, how imagination can string a footbridge between the two. “When I was still very young/ my parents moved to a small valley/ surrounded by mountains. … From our kitchen garden/you could see the mountains/snow covered, even in summer.” Some youngsters might have been chilled by this glimpse of an eternal winter but not Gluck: “I remember peace of a kind/I never knew again.”
If Gluck’s previous book, “The Seven Ages,” looked mortality in the face, stared it down, this book tells the story of a woman making a separate peace. To do so Gluck muses on the meaning of the soul. The best poems in this book are those that engage Perspephone’s story with something personal at stake.
“Averno” feels made from experience, as though Gluck has gone down to the underworld herself to confirm what we all know to be true.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
