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In the collection Meadowlands Louise Glick interweaves the story of a modern divorce with Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, with a rewriting of the myth that gives voice, first and foremost, to the secondary characters. Poetic composition, which followed the publication of the collection The Wild Iris, of great precision and clarity, written with metaphorical density and lyrical intensity, is at once comic and heartbreaking, reflective and not at all melodramatic.
Remember that time you made the wish?
I make a lot of wishes.
The time I lied to you
about the butterfly. I always wondered
what you wished for.
What do you think I wished?
I don’t know. That I’d come back,
that we’d somehow be together in the end.
I wished for what I always wish for.
I wished for another poem.
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.”
“[Gluck’s] most ambitious and compelling book. Meadowlands suggests that its much-honored author is not willing to take her own achievement for granted, and the result is a poetry more stringently dissatisfied and beautiful than ever before.”
“For more than a decade, Gluck has been writing books of poems that are meant to be encountered like novels, and has been looking into the difficult problem of finding a structure whereby an essentially lyric gift can be adapted to epic and unifying ambitions. Meadowlands gives us her most elaborate and satisfying solution.”
Louise Glück
