Synopses & Reviews
In her first new book of poems since she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, Louise Glück brilliantly interweaves in an astonishing book-length sequence — the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Meadowlands is by turns tolerant, expansive, bracingly comic and, finally, heartbreaking. Shifting between the mythic and the modern, Louise Glück teaches us to look at The Odyssey in a new and unexpected manner. Here we find Penelope stubbornly weaving, transforming waiting into an act of will; here, too, a shrewd preternaturally knowing adolescent Telemachus, a divided Odysseus, a worldly Circe. A modern couple also occupies these poems, engaged in the endless negotiation of contemporary domestic realities rendered in an ongoing conversation, eternally unresolved, rich with the charged trivia of daily life.
Review
"Among hard-edged, limpid parables about "violence of human feeling," Glück utilizes Homer's long-suffering family (Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus) as revisionist metaphor to articulate postmodern relationships among husband, wife, and child." Library Journal
Review
"Interleaves vignettes of The Odyssey and a distressed modern marriage. Grimly serious parables, amusing but disquieting spousal conversations and insightful commentaries written in the voice of Telemachus, Odysseus's son, season the 46 poems." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
In an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey.
Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided Odysseus, and a shrewd adolescent Telemachus. Through these classical figures, Meadowlands explores such timeless themes as the endless negotiation of family life, the cruelty that intimacy enables, and the frustrating trivia of the everyday. Gluck discovers in contemporary life the same quandary that lies at the heart of The Odyssey: the unanswerable/affliction of the human heart: how to divide/the world's beauty into acceptable/and unacceptable loves.
About the Author
Louise Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993. The author of eight books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She was named the next U.S. poet laureate in August 2003. Her most recent book is The Seven Ages. Louise Glück teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.