To anyone who has spent time in New Jersey, the word meadowlands invokes not only pastoral landscapes but also football games and swampy pools of industrial waste. Louise Glück wants readers of Meadowlands, her seventh book of poems, to keep both of these connotations in mind. …

… Think of the Yeats of In the Seven Woods, turning not only against the highly wrought symbolism of The Wind Among the Reeds but against the long tradition of Western love poetry – the "old high way of love": he and the beloved have "grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon." Among recent achievements in poetry, Meadowlands offers a particularly dramatic example of this act of turning: its poems exteriorize as dialogue the conflicts that lyric poetry more often internalizes as ambiguity. ..

… Meadowlands is her In the Seven Woods, a vigorous, miscellaneous book that did not always please readers who had grown to love a more exquisite Yeats. To me, Meadowlands seems like a brave book, one that shows its author reaching far beyond what she knows she can do. …

… [T]he dilemma of Meadowlands[:] Challenged by the acerbic voice of her husband (who is also Odysseus), the poet (who is also Penelope) wants to entertain the possibility of including more of the world in her poems. She’s tired of reading the world as an emblematic tapestry, yet she finds it difficult to be sustained by natural things alone. What’s more, she has trouble distinguishing the natural from the emblematic …

… Many of the Telemachus poems are spoken in an attractive middle voice: terse, ironic, but still lyrical and occasionally rising to eloquence. And inc ertain of the Penelope poems, the more colloquial language associated with the husband appears without his flipness, suggesting that Glück is reaching for a more ample and yet less brittle idiom. … Meadowlands is remarkable precisely because it is not Glück’s most exquisite effort: it is something more than that – her most ambitious and compelling book.