Pastoral Impulses
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetr y Pastoral Impulses By Phoebe Pettingell HIGHLY ADVANCED societies are often gripped by nostalgia for a less complicated era. In Alexandria during the third century B.C.E....
...the difficulties inherent in growing fond of your sheep but also slaughtering and eating them...
...Her first collection, Scarberry Hill (2001), described episodes of their life together in a rather understated British way: the embarrassment his grown children felt at first meeting her when they caught them in bed...
...Minds can construct narratives out of fragments, filling in the blanks until we stop noticing gaps...
...At other times he identifies with the notion that everything is interconnected—trees, stars, animals, humans, and God: “we’re cut/ from the same cloth Boss/ though I am just a thread/ compared to you...
...In “Eating the Peach,” the pit “resembles/ a small mammal’s skull,” taking him along a recapitulation of biological development that also echoes the fall of man...
...Yet Sheck argues its very simplicity can kidnap us, dragging us into remote and primitive spaces where the landmarks become unfamiliar...
...Fortunately, her recent efforts burgeon into something more emotionally engaging...
...Eventually she moved from London to rural Cumbria, where at 41 she married a widowed farmer already in his late 80s...
...the silence between the musical phrases of composers like Arvo Pärt...
...O for the whole big picture you’re the painter Boss I know . . . you must have a sack full of wind somewhere a barrel full of salt a recipe for stone things like that Manning’s tone is deliberately cute...
...Maurice Manning’s Bucolics (Harcourt, 112 pp., $23.00) evokes farm life in a place resembling the rural Kentucky he portrayed in his epic about Daniel Boone, A Companion for Owls (2004...
...Still, Manning provides the reader with a wry, provocative hour of entertainment...
...These flashes suggest that she may develop from a pleasant, provincial poet to a rich and strange singer of the rural scene...
...Cole is frightened by this: Sometimes, I feel like a large, open eye, in which there is a sifting of too many things: a summer fever, brushstrokes of green larches, yellow rayflowers, Japanese beetles copulating everywhere, war, and a cut-glass tumbler of gin— all these scraps, like some eternal revenue of memory and feeling blown together...
...Even randomness creates patterns...
...But even in childhood these instincts are not uncomplicated...
...Its rolling hills, lush meadows, and lakes reflecting the sky have long embodied the popular image of the British pastoral...
...We are so rawly made,” Sheck observes, “So carried into the harsh and almost-dark// As if stung in the throat...
...The function of the strongest artistic endeavors moves us deeper into the unexplored regions of our own world...
...Theocritus amused the decadent court of Ptolemy with his Idylls, wherein shepherds pine for romance and sing plaintive eulogies for their dead comrades...
...Eschewing the traditions of Virgil or of Wordsworth Cole’s idiom is more reliant on Ovidian metamorphoses that pair horror with renewal...
...In his dogged attempts to embrace nature’s apparent grotesqueries, Cole approaches the sublime that Wordsworth defined as a mixture of awe and terror...
...Your chest heaves...
...he is as much poking fun at the way we try to humanize the impersonal as he is attempting it himself...
...He combines scientific processes (those digesting enzymes or the evolution of species) with mythic concepts...
...Fistfuls of ice slack off and pelt the stones, sluds of snow stretch and slide under the window...
...Silence Fell (Houghton Mifflin, 69 pp., $22.00), her American debut, combines selections from her first two verse collections published in Great Britain...
...The cyan-lit monitor replaces the verdant landscape, its glow as familiar as sunlight to us...
...I wonder if you hatched yourself,” he muses, confronting the idea of an everlasting deity...
...You’re shuffling papers round, I’m writing in my notebook still...
...By the late 19th century, “nature red in tooth and claw” had infringed upon those green fields and shady groves...
...J placed nature and the works of man in opposition to each other, the poetry of urban life and pastoral verse have always been considered separate genres...
...An aspect of the postmodern perspective is the tendency to look at what is not said: the lost voices of history, of slaves and of the marginalized who could not write or were ignored...
...Galway Kinnell, who discovered her work on a visit there, explains in his Preface that although at age six Dickinson became profoundly deaf overnight, prior to becoming a writer she was a musician...
...She confesses, It’s the brackets I’ve grown to love...
...The unnamed speaker in these 78 unpunctuated poems is a country boy, wondering about nature and its relationship to a divine character he calls “Boss”: the night is trotting toward me Boss as if you tapped it with a switch or clicked your tongue against your teeth it’s coming down the pasture soon I’ll hear the leather tackle squeak I’ll see your ankle swinging in the stirrup Boss you ride the night The hayseed narrator’s faux naïf tone echoes a long tradition of sophisticated writers disguising their voices to mimic local yokels, be they the “eh bah gum” dialects of English farmers or the clipped New Hampshire accents of one of Frost’s Yankee hired men...
...Shakespeare led Elizabethan audiences into the Forest of Arden where shepherdesses frolicked...
...Cumbria happens to be the setting of some of Wordsworth’s best-known poems...
...You stir to speak...
...Adam and Eve lost paradise for a world where toil, ennui, heartbreak, and death were balanced out by the satisfactions of community, the cultivation of the land and the taming of beasts large and small...
...how they don’t banish the lostness But give voice and space to absence, blanks...
...Out of rebellion comes free will, creativity and civilization...
...Sheck probes those holes in the fabric in search of whatever they might signify, in the manner of an archeologist analyzing “scraps of papyrus/ used to mummify crocodiles...
...Romantic intellectuals sat around London salons discussing Wordsworth’s rural landscapes...
...Nearer to our own time, American critics have made much of Robert Frost’s rustic New England...
...the climate and landscape of Northern England: As tiny cars are shuttling, changing place across its darkening pastures, Scarberry Hill appears to frown...
...The author’s real motives, however, are more complex than they at first appear...
...The Romans of Augustus’ reign sighed over Virgil’s Eclogues with their evocation of a pastoral world...
...Therefore, Cole concentrates on miniatures—for instance, the dead wren with “little gothic wings” who flew into a glass pane and broke its neck...
...SUNNYLANDSCAPES lg dominated pasto by the occasional thunderstorm that served to clear the air and engender a rainbow—think of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony...
...This is one of the mechanisms of evolution: Accidental mutations may allow a species to adapt more successfully to a changing environment, or else doom it to extinction...
...More and more, we use metaphors from biology to describe electronics or talk about the organic in mechanical terms...
...Even when the world seems just a heap of broken things,” he strives to make sense of the natural and emotional intricacies that cause pleasure and pain...
...At the back of the writer’s mind is the nagging suspicion that we can only describe ourselves, and that we do so to deny we may be flotsam, driven to-and-fro on the tides of a senseless sea...
...One of Captivity’s epigraphs is taken from the journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “. . . chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose...
...The speaker believes nature delights in its own complexity...
...His sixth collection, Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar Straus Giroux, 59 pp., $23.00), strives to reconcile our tempestuous interior feelings and urges with the spontaneity of beasts and flowers: Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness, as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things, trying to create something neither confessional nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines...
...What some readers have called a “mysterious” quality might equally be described as “underwritten...
...subjects a writer cannot speak about aloud because of government or social censorship...
...The urge toward the pastoral initially seeks clarity...
...Emerson longed to be “a transparent eyeball” that could see things as they are and receive them all without having to insert the distortion of interpretation...
...He mines his own experience for subjects, but never sounds conventionally confessional...
...Dickinson is drawn to short, Germanic words and regional dialect: A new lamb is “a wobbler, a blink, a dimp...
...Constantly bombarded by sensory impressions, the human mind needs to focus lest it become overwhelmed...
...Ye t by the conclusion of his musings, the speaker has come to realize that what he sees projected on the screen of the universe may be merely a giant shadow of himself: O tell me why I can’t hold back this bitter thought are you the bee or just a stinging story Boss Bucolics is itself a long “stinging story” of fundamental questions about nature, humanity and art...
...Corydon worried about his sheep straying, and we wrestle with losing our words and ideas through the “blue screen of death...
...Sheck forms a mosaic out of shreds of ideas and images, using fragments by Emerson, William James and Sappho...
...Is anything eternal...
...Eating the peach, I feel the long wandering, my human hand—once fin and paw— reaching through and across the allegory of Eden, mud, boredom, and disease, to bees, solitude, and a thousand hairs of grass blowing by chill waters...
...And like the shepherd’s song for his dead comrade, these lyrics bring fresh insight out of numbness and joy out of sorrow...
...Within hours, the tiny body begins to deliquesce: Moment by moment, enzymes digest your life into a kind of coffin liqueur...
...Though competent enough, Dickinson’s earliest work is blunted by her English restraint in describing well-worn territory...
...Four new collections of verse demonstrate that even in the postmodern age writers yearn for the simple life...
...I don’t want words to sever me from reality,” Cole insists, as he confronts the tangled confusion of adoration and resentment toward mother and father, the slavering “wolf” of sexual desire, the pull of civilizations toward carnage, the recesses of the heart that harbor our cruelty to others and masochistic pleasure in our own suffering...
...paintings or sculptures that omit parts of the picture...
...In reverting to a classical poetic form, Manning means to emphasize problems our imaginations continue to encounter: How do we know that the way we see the world outside ourselves is reality...
...In her fifth collection, Captivity (Knopf, 80 pp., $25.00), Laurie Sheck makes the case that this is a false dichotomy...
...Here is a passage describing her husband’s decline: The snow is lisping from the eaves as I listen for the blab of your heart...
...Marie Antoinette and her ladies-in-waiting played farm girls at Versailles, even as the real peasants were being incited to revolution...
...In Cole’s eyes, the beauty of nature derives from a grandeur that cracks open our timid humanism...
...Better than a vast, impersonal randomness, or even an intricate mathematical design, the narrator envisions a universe composed of feeling, breathing parts: crows whose squawks are “always making fun of something,” sun-loving butterflies, clouds racing one another, and a sky whose colors reflect the viewer’s moods...
...Henri Cole’s tranquil vistas are dappled with a chiaroscuro of pain...
...Yet rather than falling silent, “we rest we cook we talk continue on...
...Blackbird and Wolf is Cole’s most moving book to date...
...Thus, in a poem titled “The cells in their distant otherness,” Sheck compares memory lapses and the failure of the body’s nerves to react properly to a PC’s files refusing to open: “A glitch in the system keeping them separate and unknown./ There is no clarifying edge...
...She has copied accounts left by American 18th- and 19th-century pioneers, men and women taken captive by native tribes, yanked out of “civilization” into a nomadic way of life—hence the “captivity” of her title...
...The ENGLISH POET Josephine Dickinson really is a shepherdess—or, more accurately, a sheep farmer...
...The pastoral impulse, for Cole, is connected to our nostalgia for childhood—when we felt assured that our parents loved and could protect us, that everything would ultimately work out well...
...Take the computer: Edu.gov.com.mil.org.net.int— How well organized it seems, This net, this netting, Terrain of pathways mapped and taken Sheck sees parallels between this machine language and the way “a lily knows by code to be a lily...
...But this familiarity does no particular service to a budding poet trying to establish her own voice and themes...
Vol. 90 • March 2007 • No. 2
