Meadowlands.

Nash, Susan Smith

What is often unappreciated or overlooked in Louise Gluck's poetry is her ability to bring a mesmerizing array of emotional nuances to a single poem. For many poets, the result would be bathos, or undigestible cliches. However, Gluck uses disparate and often contradictory emotions to create a subtle representation of the irresolution and ambiguity that often characterize a relationship or a marriage.

The first poem of the collection, "Penelope's Song," explores anticipation and reconciliation, as the narrator addresses Penelope, who awaits the return of her lover with a poignant, dreamlike intensity that is shadowed by the realization that their relationship is very fragile. It is almost as though the more urgent her longing, the more likely that the long-anticipated reunion will be a disappointment. The problem is the body (and, by extension, language in a post-Wittgensteinian world): "You have not been completely / perfect either; with your troublesome body / you have done things you shouldn't / discuss in poems." This is a dream of unity which has been clouded by the realization that unity - if ever achieved at all - is temporary and quite delicate.

Other poems evoke the same feeling of impending rupture or existential separation. In "Departure" tension is built by the presence of two individuals who are bracing themselves for the inevitability of their separation. The poem moves from the literal to the figurative quite smoothly: "The night isn't dark; the world is dark. / Stay with me a little longer." This is a poem that defines Platonic craving for unity and the desire to ascend to the realm of perfection in terms of one's own self-awareness. Gluck's characters are postmodernist Platonists: they despair of the existence of a realm of perfection while simultaneously longing to experience it.

Gluck draws from The Odyssey for her characters in Meadowlands, and their presence in a contemporary world reinforces the impression that there is a level of determinism at work in the phenomenal world. The characters are never free to live a life of free will or self-directed freedom. The characters know their lives have been scripted for them, and they look upon their destinies with a certain degree of irony, particularly when there are moments that serve to undermine or ironize the archetypal narratives of myth.

As in most narratives that incorporate archetypes, there tends to be in Meadowlands an emphasis on the allegorical or the symbolic. This is certainly the case in Meadowlands. For example, in "Parable of the Trellis" Gluck instructs the reader to consider the elements figuratively. Here the vine is personified, and it parallels the human characters inasmuch as "the vine has a dream of light: / what is life in the dirt / with its dark freedoms / compared to supported ascent?"

What Gluck's collection brings to mind most vividly is the recollection that Greek mythological characters - and thus the archetypes which we use as models for behavior, psychology, cognition, and social relations, as well as for art and language - are always profoundly flawed. The tensions between the flawed and the perfect, the impossible and the possible, the longed-for and the defended-against create a world of interpenetrating explanation and vision. It is beautiful, yet as painful as memory.

Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma