SOURCE: Henry, Brian. “The Odyssey Revisited.” Virginia Quarterly Review 74, no. 3 (summer 1998): 571–77.

In the following essay, Henry argues that Meadowlands reveals “the tragedy common to all relationships,” asserting the poems are compelling due to Glück's unique retelling of the Odyssey myth.

Since Homer introduced that wily traveler Odysseus to the world, countless poets have attempted to resurrect the tale and make it their own. Odysseus' ten-year voyage home has become an undeniable part of our collective unconscious. Children draw a Cyclops on one page and the action figure du jour on the next. In a similar gesture, poets major and minor have dipped into the Iliad and Odyssey for their own poems; just in the past few decades, poets as diverse as Marilyn Hacker, Richard Wilbur, Margaret Atwood, Michael Longley, and Yannis Ritsos have devoted poems to Odysseus or to aspects of his journey (Circe seems to be...