In her first new book of poems since she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, Louise Gluck brilliantly interweavesin 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 Gluck 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.
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