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."