Even before Louise Glück's new volume, Meadowlands was published, admirers could be heard describing it, somewhat incongruously, as a "funny" book, with the implication that this represented a significant aesthetic departure. There was something faintly comic in itself about this advance word, which had to do with the inexpert way that people try to generate excitement about a book of poetry. It's a fact that our most accomplished poets can be at least as entertaining as a good "Seinfeld" episode, yet when poetry lovers say as much their claims are often greeted with skepticism. And for readers who are addicted to Glück's ironic inflections, her stern disenchantments, and her capacity to locate the hiding places of a massive, stationary reality, this talk was unsettling for another reason as well. Did we really want a funny Louise Glück? Readers of poetry tend to crave more of the same: they don't like to be excessively surprised by poets whom they've appropriated to their own experience.

Meadowlands is surprising and in places very funny (when Glück read from it to a packed house in New York recently, she got lots of laughs), but it's more accurately characterized as an arrival than as a departure. For more than a decade, Glück 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. If her previous book, The Wild Iris, was said to resemble a song cycle, this one can be said to resemble a complete cantata, with dramatis personae, recitatives, arias, and instrumental passages. The elements that we have come to associate with her writing—the terse lines over which a diaphanous rhetoric has been carefully laid, the abrupt shifts from romance to hardheadedness and back, the dramatic vocalizations, the flexible use of Greek and Biblical myths—have found a home in a large, baroque edifice.

Much that is authentically new has also been housed here. The vibrant schema of the book, which, in ambiguous counterpoint, employs characters and incidents from the Odyssey—a poem of arrivals and reconciliations—to tell the story of a dissolving marriage, accommodates all sorts of fresh feelings and tensions, ranging from the scabrous, such as "I said you could snuggle. That doesn't mean / your cold feet all over my dick," to the naïvely insistent, as in

If you can hear the music
you can imagine the party.
I have it all planned: first
violent love, then
sweetness

and the mutely resigned:

Does it matter where the birds go? Does it even matter

what species they are?
They leave here, that's the point,
first their bodies, then their sad cries.
And from that moment, cease to exist for us.

This schema accommodates a chorus of actual persons, too, from the great dead (Maria Callas, Otis Redding) to next-door neighbors (the Lights, who entertain themselves by playing klezmer music) and figures from current events (Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms, formerly of the New York Giants). Up to now, Glück volumes have been sparsely populated. Meadowlands, by comparison, is a metropolis.

Although Glück 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. Consequently, her work falls naturally into discernible stages. She began by writing what used to be called "deep image" poetry, a variant of the confessional mid-century American lyric in which the otherwise static surface of the poem was enlivened by an infusion of energy from the subconscious:

As though a voice were saying
You should be asleep by now—
But there was no one. Nor
had the air darkened,
though the moon was there,
already filled in with marble.

This Celtic-twilight period ended with her third volume, Descending Figure (1980)—a perfect book of poetry, but one whose very perfection seemed to exhaust its inherent possibilities. In her next book, The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Glück turned away from this earlier work with a vengeance:

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man's mouth
sealing my mouth, the man's
paralyzing body—

The oblique way of working which she had mastered was now brought to bear on sexual and familial politics and on the sensation, always excruciating in this poet, of consciousness trapped in nature. The poems were at once more intimate than confessions and more objective than allegories. They looked slender but were nevertheless monumental; they had sharp edges, and they gleamed with asperity and carefully modulated anger.

Glück hasn't abandoned the edges and the anger in Meadowlands, and obliqueness still characterizes her method of operation, though at an angle of incidence considerably less steep. What distinguishes Meadowlands from her previous work is the earthiness that she displays and the newfound willingness to let her readers enter the honey-combed quotidian life out of which her poetry is written. This is a brave gesture on her part, and it reflects a supremely rewarded poetic self-confidence.