And inc ertain of the Penelope poems, the more colloquial language associated with the husband appears without his flipness, suggesting that Gl ck is reaching for a more ample and yet less brittle idiom. The Wild Iris has been torn up in Meadowlands by frustration and violence. Meadowlands follows much the same model, the earlier poems sketching apprehension and raw hostility, the final poems succumbing to acceptance. Gl ck speaks in the persona of Penelope, waiting for a husband who will, in this case, never come back. Gl ck's husband, half of a communing dialogue, is a frequently cruel Odysseus.
Some people are 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. 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. As in Homer, Gl ck's husband and wife suffer separately and without benefit of communication. Bicker, Nostalgia, Regret.