Megan said she read this book in one sitting at the best bookstore in Chelsea and loved it, so I decided to get it from the library, and am glad I did. At the start of this book we learn this: “Averno. Ancient name Avernus. A small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy; regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld.” This collection of linked poems is about passing between worlds: childhood and adulthood, death and life, existence and memory, and seasons, too; it uses the myth of Persephone to play with some of those passings. I like this image of Persephone and the start of spring: “Come to me, said the world. I was standing/in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—” (p 9). Elsewhere, autumn is “an allegory of waste,” (p 11), dry fields that can be burned to ash, the world on the verge of death. Also pleasing is the mix of mythic and not, lines like this, which Megan had quoted to me, about riding the subway and reading: “you are not alone,/the poem said,/in the dark tunnel” (p 14), and then the wry humor and intelligence of the mythic poems like “Persephone the Wanderer,” which reminds the reader: “You are allowed to like/no one, you know. The characters/are not people.” (p 16). Other highlights: the wintry world of the second section of “Landscape,” “A Myth of Innocence” and “A Myth of Devotion,” the first stanza of “Telescope,” which describes the moment of disorientation after looking through a telescope, coming back to earth when you’ve been among the stars—which isn’t too dissimilar to the moment of emerging from a book you’ve been lost in, and the matter-of-fact-ness of the third part of “Averno,” which includes this:
Some young girls ask me
if they’ll be safe near Averno—
they’re cold, they want to go south a little while.
And one says, like a joke, but not too far south—I say, as safe as anywhere
which makes them happy.
What it means is nothing is safe. (p 64)
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