Averno Book

That Gluck voice. Keep trying to understand why it has such a vulnerable authority, like someone wielding a dagger then using it to offer you a piece of fruit. A voice poised between challenge and cowering, distance and closeness, indifference and intimacy. In "Prism," it's the daughters "assignment" to fall in love; an improper "vaccination" leads to passion, desire and the search for love; the lover is "the stranger" in the shock of "the first dawn." There's a lot of attempt at dichotomy: of breaking mother, lover, and daughter into superego, id, and ego; of the soul and the body; of good and bad; death and life. But Gluck often undermines these dichotomies or, at least, subverts them: in "Crater Lake" it is ironically the body and not death that might have betrayed us by making us fear "love." The title of the collection, Averno, as well as this particular poem, "Crater Lake," suggests we are more on the cusp of things, the liminal space of the entranceway to the underworld.
And for a book based on the myth of Persephone and, thus, on the earth and the underworld, there is so much mention of sky. This seems a subversion as well. This disorientation feels somehow purposeful, as though we, like Persephone, despite Zeus' promise to allow her to "forget" her passage, half-remember the place between extremes. To quote from "Prism" again: "Then the rain again, erasing / footprints in the damp earth. / An implied path, like / a map without a crossroads."

In addition to "Prism," the first "Persephone The Wanderer" struck a deep chord. These brutal lines especially: "…the tale of Persephone / which should be read / as an argument between the mother and the lover' / the daughter is just meat."