Underworlds

Ancient and modern meet in these haunting poems.

AVERNO

By Louise Gl?ck

Farrar Straus Giroux. 79 pp. $22

Reading Louise Gl?ck is excruciating -- and this is a compliment. A poet of taut intensities, she walks a high-wire between the oracular and everyday, the absolute and the ephemeral, the monumental and the delicate. In her latest book, Gl?ck ushers us into the realm of the dead: Averno is the lake west of Naples that, according to the Romans, was the entrance to the Underworld. Taking up the myth of Persephone -- the at story of Demeter's daughter initiated (or abducted) into sex by Hades, lord of the Underworld -- Gl?ck explores death, memory, sexuality, family and, most profoundly, "soul-making," as Keats put it. The poet moves through "All the different nouns -- / she says them in rotation./ Death, husband, god, stranger ."

Gl?ck is less interested in family romance or sexual trauma than in our mortality and our decisive alienation from nature. In a remarkable opening sequence, "October," she evokes our precarious attachment to the Earth in a ceaseless rhythmic interrogative: "Is it winter again, is it cold again/ . . . wasn't my body/ rescued, wasn't it safe/ . . . weren't we necessary to the earth,// the vines, were they harvested?" Gl?ck emerges here as a romantic poet -- a 21st-century American heir of Wordsworth and Shelley. Like them, she interrogates the world and finds it inadequate to the mind; and like the Romantics at their most skeptical and chastened, she treats myths not as consolations but as probes for thought. Of the Persephone myth Gl?ck writes: "You are allowed to like/ no one, you know. The characters/ are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict."

Alert to mythic structure, its fissures and tensions, Gl?ck analyzes and doesn't merely recycle mythic motifs. "Spring will return, a dream/ based on a falsehood:/ that the dead return." Instead of hymns to the sun, we get a blistering critique: "That's what/ the sun meant: it meant/ scorched -- "

Usually when poets turn to myth, I get anxious, anticipating yet another banal poem tricked-out with fancy Greek or Roman names, the poet relieved of invention by old plots dutifully retold. Too often myth serves as bogus prop, a bid for high seriousness, cultural capital and poeticity. It is easy to invoke dead gods and old stories, hard to make live poems out of them. Anne Carson manages this latter feat, and Gl?ck does, too.

Gl?ck's death-haunted poems are electrically alive, even as they conjure a trance-like state. Unfolding in sequences, the poems are often stationed in interzones or on thresholds. Persephone famously spends part of every year in hell: This period is winter, and this is also, in some accounts, death. The myth allows Gl?ck to explore something increasingly prominent in her work: an eerie, almost posthumous voice and stance. We hear "The sound of the sea -- / just memory now"; we see

The world

was bleached, like a negative; the light passed

directly through it. Then