… For Louise Glück in her newest book, divorce is the start awake after the sleep-walking of a bad relationship. …

… The uneasy marital landscape of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris has been torn up in Meadowlands by frustration and violence. In "Parable of the Hostages," Glück writes of the Greek soldiers that "the world has begun / calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s / loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens." Meadowlands follows much the same model, the earlier poems sketching apprehension and raw hostility, the final poems succumbing to acceptance. …

Meadowlands is haunted by voices. Glück speaks in the persona of Penelope, waiting for a husband who will, in this case, never come back. Glück’s husband, half of a communing dialogue, is a frequently cruel Odysseus. (After telling herr to wish on a butterfly, he announces smugly, "It doesn’t count.") Like Anne Sexton and others, Glück lets traditional villainesses speak for themselves, giving a sympathetic voice to a siren and to Circe, who in "Circe’s Power" has a refreshing defense: "I never turned anyone into a pig. / Some people are pigs. I make them / look like pigs." A frustrated, perceptive Telemachus has several dialogues as well.

… The book is full of sudden juxtapositions of elements from two familiar but disparate worlds, classical Greece and modern America. Why has Glück chosen the location of a football field to frame this tempest? Perhaps because stadiums, the setting of both glory and carnage, are our equivalent of the Homeric battlefield, which here is also the last stand of the heart. …

Separation can speak for itself. "From this point on," Glück says in "Quiet Evening," "the silence through which you move / is my voice pursuing you." She has arranged Meadowlands, full of ocean references, in wave patterns: poems describing hints of reconciliation alternate with accounts of the triggering of minefields both have been planting for a decade. The knock of waves against pilings is an answer to the perpetual question Do you love me? Yes and no and yes and no. And if silence can be speech, absence contrives to be presence as well…

If The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’ homecoming, Meadowlands details its negative: the same ten years’ journey, but away from Ithaca, toward uncharted waters. As in Homer, Glück’s husband and wife suffer separately and without benefit of communication. But in this version, they have to visit treacherous islands together: Bicker, Nostalgia, Regret. Instead of Penelope’s nightly unweaving to deceive her suitors, here it is the marriage that is being undone; when all is said and done there is nothing but memory, a poor foundation to hold them up.

The husband – "a man training himself to avoid the heart" – is no hero here, and in "Penelope’s Song" the wife says to herself, "you have not been completely / perfect either; with your troublesome body / you have done things you shouldn’t / discuss in poems." Conspicuously, Glück avoids specifying what Penelope – she – has done in the absence of the wandering king. She also leaves out the details of the husband’s wanderings, though the blame seems principally assigned to him.

The starkness, the lack of filigree, in Glück’s lines is a window on her internal pandemonium. …