A collection of essays in which the author writes of her own upbringing, her human and literary antecedents, and also dwells on lives and poems. The book includes writings on T.S. Eliot, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, and John Berryman.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection 'At last the night surrounded me; / I floated on it, perhaps in it, / or it carried me as a river carries / a boat'. In Louise Gluck's new collection, night takes on the dimensions of myth, becomes the setting for a sequence of journeys and explorations through time and memory, as the speaker of the poems moves backwards into childhood and forwards into 'the kingdom of death'. Gluck draws equally on the worlds of fairy-tale, of dream and of waking life, each poem a door into a narrative both haunting and compellingly beautiful.

'Brilliant poems of complex, haunting power... Averno may be Gluck's masterpiece' The New York Times Book Review An acclaimed collection from the Nobel prize-winning poet This startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace...