BRIEFLY NOTED.(poetry)(Book review)

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Poetry

Averno, by Louise Gluck (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22). Few poets can shoulder the weight of myth the way Gluck does. Here, in eighteen linked poems, she rewrites the legend of Persephone, offering the girl respite from centuries of being "pawed over by scholars." For Gluck, the myth is, ultimately, "an argument between the mother and the lover-- / the daughter is just meat." Gluck's language, grave and precise, gives Persephone an elegant home in which to grow up. "The girl who disappears from the pool / will never...

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