Averno, a crater lake in southern Italy, was for the Romans the entrance to the underworld, both gateway and impassable barrier between the living and the dead. In Louise Gluck's latest collection, Averno is the only source of heat and light in a world turned to icy winter. Ancient myth is reanimated in the desolation of Persephone's laments for the lost warmth of earthly life. Both epic and intimate in scope, "Averno" explores the enduring drama of love and death.

'Gluck stands at the centre of time and speaks, not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul.' - Partisan Review 'Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain.' - Washington PostBiografía del autorLouise Gluck was born in 1943 in New York. She is divorced with one son. She started her teaching career in 1971 at Goddard College, Vermont. At present she is a Professor at Williams College and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of seven collections of poems and a volume of essays. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Bobbitt National Poetry Prize, and the Ambassador's Award for her poetry, as well as the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Vita Nova won the first annual New Yorker Readers Award. Louise Gluck has been appointed Poet Laureate in the USA.