Meadowlands (Italian Edition)

by Louise Glück, Bianca Tarozzi (Translator)

Overview

In Meadowlands Louise Glück esplora con i suoi versi la rovinosa fine di un matrimonio e indaga la natura di quei sentimenti che ciascuno di noi crede eterni prima che qualcosa li incrini, finendo per dissiparli e inesorabilmente estinguerli. Ma come è possibile che l’amore si estingua? Come possiamo accettare che si trasformi in odio? In questo profondo scandaglio del cuore umano, ancora una volta sono protagonisti i miti. Louise Glück si misura in queste pagine direttamente con le principali figure dell’Odissea: riprende le posizioni di Penelope e di Ulisse, i dubbi e i dolori di Telemaco, e li intreccia con le angosce, le crisi e le crudeltà che, dall’antichità classica fino al presente, segnano i rapporti tra esseri umani.«Come dividere / la bellezza del mondo in amori accettabili / e inaccettabili?» È una domanda che resta in sospeso, in attesa dell’eroe che sappia trovare una risposta.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9791259811110
Publisher:	Il Saggiatore
Publication date:	03/13/2023
Sold by:	BOOKREPUBLIC SRL
Format:	eBook
Pages:	140
File size:	2 MB
Language:	Italian

About the Author

Louise Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993. The author of eight books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She was named the next U.S. poet laureate in August 2003. Her most recent book is The Seven Ages. Louise Glück teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

Penelope's Song

Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
do now as I bid you, climb
the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
wait at the top, attentive, like
a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
it behooves you to be
generous. You have not been completely
perfect either; with your troublesome body
you have done things you shouldn't
discuss in poems. Therefore
call out to him over the open water, over the bright water
with your dark song, with your grasping,
unnatural song--passionate,
like Maria Callas. Who
wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite
could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime,
suntanned from his time away, wanting
his grilled chicken. Ali, you must greet him,
you must shake the boughs of the tree
to get his attention,
but carefully, carefully, lest
his beautiful face be marred
by too many falling needles.
Medowlands. Copyright © by Louise Gluck. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Glck's seventh collection (following The Wild Iris, 1993's Pulitzer winner) interleaves vignettes of the Odyssey and a distressed modern marriage. Grimly serious parables, amusing but disquieting spousal conversations and insightful commentaries written in the voice of Telemachus, Odysseus's son, season the 46 poems. Assessing his parents' lives, Telemachus observes, "heartbreaking, but also/ insane. Also/ very funny." In "Anniversary," Glck captures the particular cruelty made possible by intimacy: "Someone should teach you how to act in bed./ ...Look what you did-/ you made the cat move." In another, the depths of marital alienation are captured by a woman who weeps, holding a bag of garbage in an unlit garage at midnight: "...is this the way the heart/ behaves when it grieves: it wants to be alone with the garbage?" Despite humor, there is little joy. Glck sees, in daily life as in Odysseus's heroic one, the "unanswerable/ affliction of the human heart: how to divide/ the world's beauty into acceptable/ and unacceptable loves." These compressed and tightly focused poems are organized into a short collection of exceptional punch. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The lyrical Gluck, who won a Pulitzer for The Wild Iris, uses the Odyssey to illuminate contemporary marriage in the "chastened, spiritual" poems of Meadowlands. (LJ 3/15/96)

Library Journal

A sociological study of a alternative health care organization, developed from a symbolic interactionist perspective that assumes even the least dramatic action to have meaning for those who engage in it. Discusses the political consequences of the meanings and the constraints that unfairly advantage some groups or individuals and disadvantage others. Particularly investigates how people who considered themselves alternative managed to reproduce conventional gender inequalities. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"[Gluck's] most ambitious and compelling book. Meadowlands suggests that its much-honored author is not willing to take her own achievement for granted, and the result is a poetry more stringently dissatisfied and beautiful than ever before."

The Yale Review

"Although Gluck is still in the middle of her career, it's clear that she is one of those poets—like Yeats, for example, and unlike Stevens—whose writing is provoked by their unfolding temporal life. . . . For more than a decade, Gluck has been writing books of poems that are meant to be encountered like novels, and has been looking into the difficult problem of finding a structure whereby an essentially lyric gift can be adapted to epic and unifying ambitions. Meadowlands gives us her most elaborate and satisfying solution."

The New Yorker

"Although Gluck is still in the middle of her career, it's clear that she is one of those poets—like Yeats, for example, and unlike Stevens—whose writing is provoked by their unfolding temporal life. . . . For more than a decade, Gluck has been writing books of poems that are meant to be encountered like novels, and has been looking into the difficult problem of finding a structure whereby an essentially lyric gift can be adapted to epic and unifying ambitions. Meadowlands gives us her most elaborate and satisfying solution."

The New Yorker

"[Gluck's] most ambitious and compelling book. Meadowlands suggests that its much-honored author is not willing to take her own achievement for granted, and the result is a poetry more stringently dissatisfied and beautiful than ever before." — The Yale Review

"Although Gluck is still in the middle of her career, it's clear that she is one of those poets—like Yeats, for example, and unlike Stevens—whose writing is provoked by their unfolding temporal life. . . . For more than a decade, Gluck has been writing books of poems that are meant to be encountered like novels, and has been looking into the difficult problem of finding a structure whereby an essentially lyric gift can be adapted to epic and unifying ambitions. Meadowlands gives us her most elaborate and satisfying solution." — The New Yorker

From the Publisher