I'm a little underwhelmed by Louise Gluck's Averno, but that's okay. She has a few killer lines:
"It does me on good; violence has changed me." (#2)
Mmmm-kay! Better yet, a concisely bitter glance back at a former lover, who has seemingly escaped the flaming detritus of their break-up:
"So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart." (#4)
Whooo! Being a fan of Greek myth myself, I couldn't held but be excited that she continually returns to the Persephone/Hades story. I never felt totally satisfied, however - when these myths are so fraught with history and expectation, I suppose it's quite difficult to overcome in a way which does not readily slip into cliche. I mean, she goes for the obvious, which is okay in the same way that I found the movie "Black Swan" to be a rather obvious, if not well-done, swipe at the cliches of ballet. Although it's "clever" or whatever to perform a feminist revision of those myths, I'm just a little bored to find that Gluck paints a Persephone as the listless girl-victim, the "piece of meat" between Hades and her mother.
But whatever. I'm tainted for having read Adrienne Rich's incredible 1971 essay, "When We Dead Awaken", just prior to opening up my Gluck. What resonated for me was Rich's point that yeah, duh, women poets have anger. Rightfully so. But it's not sufficiently interesting to wallow in it, poetically-speaking. 1971. Rich said this in 1971. So for me, Gluck's poetry came off as a half-hearted, polite sort of poetry interested more in its cool beauty than in actually doing anything. Like a dull fusion of naval-gazing and pseudo-feminist sentiments, as though she were trying to hitch herself onto a fashionable train. There are a few flashes of good lines, but altogether I'm confused as to what the big deal is about.
Even more boring than Gluck is Marianne Moore. And that's all I have to say.
