Meadowlands

A diverse collection of poems that interweaves the dissolution of a modern marriage with the events of The Odyssey brings such familiar characters as Penelope, Telemachus, Odysseus, and Circe into an endless negotiation of domestic realities and unresolved conversations and poems.

Louise Gluck sows the fertile subject ground of marital discord in harvesting this crop of gems. The poems zing back and forth as the verses alternate between man and woman. "Flaubert had more friends and Flaubert was a recluse" says he, followed by her response, "Flaubert was crazy; he lived with his mother," In one scene they argue over dead French writers; later they discuss football. Yet Gluck's work is more than a series of barbs. She writes in the nuances and language of a marriage, laid out against the voices of Odysseus and Penelope.