Meadowlands

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."

• A Modern Mythology Retelling: The epic journey of Odysseus is recast as the painful, intimate story of a marriage ending, with a worldly Circe, a shrewd Telemachus, and a defiant Penelope at its heart.
• Marriage and Divorce in Verse: This collection unflinchingly explores the cruelty that intimacy enables, the timeless negotiations of family life, and the emotional landscape of separation.
• Book-Length Poetic Sequence: More than just a collection of individual poems, this is a single, cohesive narrative that weaves ancient myth and modern life into one unforgettable story.
• Lyrical and Bitingly Honest: Gluck’s sharp, contemporary voice tackles the central affliction of the human heart: how to separate the world's beauty into acceptable and unacceptable loves.

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."

"Although Gluck is still in the middle of her career, it's clear that she is one of those poets—like Yeats, for example, and unlike Stevens—whose writing is provoked by their unfolding temporal life. . . . 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." - The New Yorker