Averno

Averno is a masterful collection of poems by Nobel Prize-winning poet Franz Glück, exploring the themes of loss, grief, and the search for meaning in the face of inevitable death. The poems offer deepened understanding and a powerful lamentation, but are resisted by the insistent presence of the Earth.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 96 pages
Publication date: 26 August 2021
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Brilliant poems of complex, haunting power, Averno is Glück's masterpiece. The New York Times Book Review praised the acclaimed collection from the Nobel prize-winning poet as "startlingly original." This 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 mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's 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.

Weight: 82g
Dimension: 198 x 129 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780241526002