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    Meadowlands
    Meadowlands
    Meadowlands
    Ebook78 pages43 minutes

    Meadowlands

    By Louise Glück

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 4, 2022
    ISBN9780063117594
    Meadowlands
    Author

    Louise Glück

    Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Meadowlands

    4.5/5

    57 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I picked this up as a possible source for a term paper in 2008. I knew a few poems in that it wouldn't work out, but I liked enough of what I read to finish it.
      Sadly, I can't remember any more of what I thought while reading this. I distinctly recall loving a few of the lines, but nothing really stands out for me now. My own rating from 2008 gives this a 4/5.
    • 4/5
      I read this collection for a class, and although I don't understand poetry the greatest, there definitely were a few that spoke to me and that I found to be really nice. All in all, this collection was pretty great.
    • 5/5
      This volume of poetry is part of my reading assignments for a graduate poetry seminar. These connected poems weave through Homer’s Odyssey with appearances by Penelope, Telemachus, Odysseus, Circe, the Sirens, Greek soldiers, along with a few references to the Bible. The overarching theme is loss and separation and sadness.Glück connects these serial poems (the subject of the assignment) with a variety of threads – birds, flowers, music – and a series of parables on the king, hostages, a trellis, a beast, a dove, flight, swans, faith, and a gift.Quoting individual poems in the series will not give the flavor or the unity of this collection, but there were a few outstanding lines that especially struck me. For example, “from this point on, the silence through which you move/is my voice pursuing you” (5); “change your form and you change your nature/And time does this to us” (32); and “if I am in her head forever/I am in your life forever” (46).Part of the fun of this collection is piecing together these individual poems and seeing how they fit into the overall narrative of Homer’s epic poem. A great collection of poetry – even for those who do not read a lot of poetry. 5 stars--Jim, 7/2/09
    • 5/5
      I consider this Gluck's best book-- tender, funny, engaged, hopeful, with some classical themes and very modern at the same time.

    Book preview

    Meadowlands - Louise Glück

    Penelope’s Song

    Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,

    do now as I bid you, climb

    the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;

    wait at the top, attentive, like

    a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;

    it behooves you to be

    generous. You have not been completely

    perfect either; with your troublesome body

    you have done things you shouldn’t

    discuss in poems. Therefore

    call out to him over the open water, over the bright water

    with your dark song, with your grasping,

    unnatural song—passionate,

    like Maria Callas. Who

    wouldn’t want you? Whose most demonic appetite

    could you possibly fail to answer?

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