Like much of Louise Glück’s work, Meadowlands … is rooted in the contests of love and power that permeate Greek myth. Here The Odyssey supplies the story. Like Ararat and The Wild Iris, Meadowlands is a sequence; its poems are skillful digressions that parallel Odysseus’ wanderings. The "meadowlands" of the title suggest a nostalgic pastoral mode, as well as a contemporary setting: in a deflation of classical grandeur, Giants Stadium symbolizes the field of contest between the lovers. Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus and Circe all tell their versions in these pages, interspersed with a series of "Parables." Along the way, Glück gives us neither the patient Penelope of Homer nor the resourceful Penelope of feminist revisions. Her heroine is both long-suffering and self-punishing; her partner taunts and torments her.

It’s little wonder, then, that this couple’s narrative marches steadily toward separation. In Glück’s rendition, it’s divorce, not reunion, that ends the story. Toward the close of the sequence, a rare moment of tenderness in "Reunion" ("And as he speaks, ah, / tenderly he touches her forearm") is followed by "The Dream" which opens: "I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed we were married again." …

… [E]xchanges between husband and wife, cast in accessible, colloquial language, show Glück at her best – questioning the unlikely prospect of sustained affection. …

But despite Glück’s unsentimental mapping of love’s decline, many of these poems lack an edge. Certainly, there are the sharp, epigrammatic insights that she always provides. And the poems spoken by Circe are among the most cutting and funny in the book: "I never turned anyone into a pig.’ Some people are pigs; I make them / look like pigs." But there are flaccid moments as well, especially at the opening of the sequence. "Penelope’s Song" strains to set up the plot that follows. …

As for her treatment of desire and absence, the bottom line in Meadowlands is that both partners are hopelessly self-absorbed. … [I]n this grim view of modern love, there’s little to learn beyond the limits of each speaker’s ego.