Publishing House: Shanghai People's Publishing House
Producer: Century Wenjing
Subtitle: Poems by Louise gleeck.
Original name: Abino, life in a village, the first four books.
Translator: Liu Xiangyang/Fan Jing Wow.
Publication year: 20 16-5
Page count: 363
Pricing: 65.00 yuan
Binding: hardcover
Series: silent classics
ISBN: 9787208 134003
Until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul, Gehrig's two complete poems, Afreh Noe (New England Pen Award) and Country Life (Griffin Poetry Award shortlist); In addition, there are five early poems, including the eldest son (Poet Award of the American Poetry Society), House on the Marsh, Falling Image, Victory of Achilles (National Book Award) and Mount Ale (Rebecca, Library of Congress? Bobbitt National Poetry Award).
Louise. Gleeck (Louise gleeck, 1943-)
American Poet Laureate, born in a Jewish family in Hungary, published his first collection of poems, The First Son, from 65438 to 0968. So far, he has written 12 poems and a collection of prose poems, and won various poetry awards, including Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Award, Wallace? Stevens Award, Paulingen Award, etc.
Gleeck's poems are good at grasping psychological subtlety, and his early works are autobiographical. Through the confrontation between man and god and the psychological analysis of mythical characters, the later works lead to the fundamental problems of human existence such as love, death, life and destruction. Starting from Mount Ale, each of her poems has a delicate texture, which can be used as a long poem or as a group of poems. Starting from Maijiu Mountain and Wild Iris, gleeck became a "must-read poet".
David:
Poetry has always been the maid of myth, and vice versa. Sometimes poets are busy collecting and rewriting myths handed down from generation to generation, such as Ovid's Metamorphosis and Poetic Eda. Sometimes, poetry endows historical and legendary stories and characters with a mythical charm, and even adds color to other mythical characters (the hero of Aeneas is a nobody in the Iliad). Therefore, some poets equate the concept of myth with the irrational characteristics that people usually think poetry has. In 1948, robert Graves said: "If a poet has never seen a naked king crucified on a chopped oak cross in a vision, if he has never seen a dancer whose eyes are dyed red by fireworks on the altar, he will keep repeating the monotonous voice' Kill! Kill! "kill!" Blood! Blood! Blood! He can't understand the essence of poetry. "This description sounds more like a seriously deformed strip club picnic, but in short, you understand the meaning.
The relationship between poetry and myth is the center of Louise gleeck's poetry collection. In gleeck's generation, no poet relied more obviously on philip larkin's myth bet about * * *. Look at the titles of these poems: Gemini, Aphrodite, Victory of Achilles, Legend, Illusion, Fable, Amazon, Song of Penelope, Telemarcos in Dilemma, The Pain of Chelsea, Eurydice and Persephone the Wanderer. The titles listed don't even include her 1992 poetry collection Wild Iris, which is based on the fable system of garden plants as a whole. Myths, legends and fairy tales are like the original potatoes to the famous chef Alice Waters.
Given gleeck's feelings, this may be inevitable. She always (and consciously) prefers universality to individuality-from the beginning, her lines almost completely abandoned the chattering style of news reports and the list of popular cultural terms that have been very common in contemporary American poetry since Frank O 'Hara. Gleeck's poems are dreamy, calm and mysterious. It's very quiet and very strong. It focuses on a core theme almost in a very strong way. These poems revolve around words such as darkness, pond, soul, body and land. It is the kind of poem that frequently uses judgment sentences at the beginning of "this is". It uses subtle tone changes to create a powerful effect, just like a bird flying on the ocean, flying hundreds of kilometers by flapping its wings repeatedly. Perhaps more importantly, these poems rely on artistic conception, hints and atmosphere: gleeck's master talent lies not in the scene itself, but in the creation of the scene.
These construction processes are generally dark. In her first book of poetry, The First Son (1968), we saw a group of tortured lovers, blocked windows, disabled people, restless families and other images. Even the robin frowned ("Mother withered on her egg"). In this early work, the influence of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell is very significant, such as the first few lines of the poem "Single Lady":
Live in seclusion like snails and conchs.
In the Atlantic city of Edgar.
Stand up and put the garbage in.
On the soft and vast beach, there are those pedantic
Drink tea and chat ...
It's almost like "Lowell 1959". You can see the general outline of the themes of gleeck's later poems here, but at this time they are still clumsily wrapped in the skills of learning from others.
But not long after, in her second book of poetry, A House on the Marsh, gleeck showed her personal characteristics in an exciting way. At this time, the turbulent water surface in early poetry became smooth, very vast and completely dark. This new feature is equally critical to the poem itself and the world it creates, which is vividly displayed in Helen Wendell's poems which are called "hierarchical and non-secular". At the beginning of the Messenger, she wrote:
You can only wait, they will find you.
Wild geese fly low over the swamp,
Shining in the black water.
They found you.
The poet's voice seems a little strange to the original meaning of these words here-a sense of foreign land-as if it came from a priest who no longer cared about human beings centuries ago. After these geese, gleeck wrote an article about deer ("How beautiful they are/it seems that their bodies will never get in their way." ) This poem ends like this:
You can only make it happen:
That cry-let go, let go-is like the moon.
Break free from the earth and rise.
Full bow
Until they come to you.
Like a dead thing, it carries the body,
And you are above them, wounded, but dominant.
The key word here is "leading". In his own way, gleeck pointed to the will of propulsion in traditional romantic nature poems-to see our own reflection in nature is to turn nature into our servants. Most importantly, gleeck's mature poems always revolve around the theme of control and domination.
Of course, for all poets, this judgment is true to some extent. The structure of poetry always organizes and controls experience. However, it is one thing to control the effect of a poem, and it is another to write the beginning of "drowning child" (in the poetry collection "Falling Images" published by 1980):
You see, they have no judgment.
So it's natural that they drown,
First, the ice swallowed them.
Then all winter, their wool scarves
Floating behind them, when they sink,
Until finally quiet down.
The pond holds them up with its countless dark arms.
"Nature": Obviously, child drowning is not natural at all-or to what extent nature is mentioned here, we can't help but wonder what this word means. This is gleeck's point of view. The operation mode of those forces (time, space, our unconscious desires) that transcend our individuals and control our lives exceeds the daily demand for things such as fares and payment terms. Rather than being irrational, they have nothing to do with reason and are irresistible. This fact may be frightening, but as gleeck's first poem shows, these forces can also be uncomfortably beautiful, just as a shark or tsunami can be very beautiful.
However, the control that attracts Gehrig most lies in the kind of control that one seeks when getting along with others and people. Her poems about interpersonal relationships-whether between men and women or between family members-are mercilessly focused on the hand that controls the whip. About sisters: "One is always watching,/the other is dancing." About sex: "A woman as naked as a stone/has this advantage:/She controls the port." About friendship: "In these friendships, one person always serves another, and one person is inferior to the other." About mother and daughter: "Suppose/you see your mother/torn between two daughters:/What can you do/save her, except/willing to destroy/yourself". This attitude is very easy to imitate-not every frustrating weekend trip is a ritual struggle between psychological archetypes-but in the most powerful works of gleeck's early poems, you will find how those eccentric desires infiltrate and determine our very daily actions, secretly inciting violence that we don't even think is a kind of injury.
Describing these unconscious desires is one of the basic functions of myth. This explains why Gehrig, who is very interested in who did what to whom and why, keeps returning to the characters. These characters are not concrete people in reality, but the embodiment of generalized anxiety, especially the anxiety about betrayal and abandonment. (In Gleiter in the Dark, Gleiter said to Hansel, "Many nights, I wanted you to hold me,/but you weren't there." The problem is that this writing strategy will cause poetry to stay within its own boundaries, just like the forgotten road monument in the Arctic.
Gleeck is well aware of this problem. So when she entered middle age, she began to add more references from her personal life to her poems. The center of Mount Ale (1990) is her father's death, while Caochang (1996) is about her divorce experience. She joined the spoken language. She began to try humor. I feel that my life is over and my heart is broken. So I moved to Cambridge. Gleeck, who took this writing path, followed a very mature change pattern in the history of American poetry. Roughly speaking, a poet who was very strong, closed and obsessed with himself when he was young gradually began to understand the outside world and developed a personal and intimate middle-aged style, which was richer in texture than those angry early works.
But this model does not belong to gleeck. Although her poems in middle age are never bad, she may fall into self-indulgence in general methods. In the past, gleeck quoted myth by preserving its strangeness (which is also the truth of myth), but now, the way she quoted myth is more obviously like psychoanalysis. Myth, psychology and poetry are interrelated, but they are still different ways to think about our existence in the world. They often blend with each other and gain something from each other, but it is very dangerous to let one way dominate the other. As Jung said, "If a work of art can be explained like neurosis, then either it is neurosis or it is a work of art." In gleeck's earlier poems, we will see such a sentence from the garden of 1980:
The garden praises you.
For you, it paints itself with green paint,
With intoxicating roses,
So you will come with the person you love.
But this indifference was replaced by the following sentence in 1999 "New Life":
In the dream of divorce
We are arguing: who will own it?
This puppy,
Blizzard, you tell me
What does this name mean? he is
Some kind of furry behemoth
And a dachshund
Hybrid varieties.
In a Divorce Dream: Now, Miss gleeck, maybe we can start. Isn't it?
If gleeck's writing path ends here, it's not a bad thing. After all, no one expects a poet to keep the flame burning for decades. If she can write five, ten or even a dozen excellent poems in her poetry writing career, she will have succeeded, which gleeck can easily do. However, there is another important factor. Gleeck's Country Life (2009) is one of her best poetry collections. These poems remind people of her early poems, but they are not imitating them. These poems focus on an unspoken and imaginary rural life, which is spoken by the voices of various rural residents (including an unforgettable earthworm). Dark and unrealistic colors are typical features of gleeck, but the atmosphere is brand-new. It contains a sad sense of hope in the seasonal changes: death, birth and rebirth. Most importantly, these poems contain each other. Gleeck didn't know other people in his life, but imagined people-that is to say, the existence of these characters shows that gleeck's sensibility has been further broadened and deepened. At the end of Country Life, a farmer said this in his poem:
Outside the window, the moon is hanging above the earth.
Full of information but meaningless.
It's dead, it's always been dead,
But it pretends to be something else, like
It burns like a star, burning convincingly, making you feel sometimes.
It may really grow something on the earth.
If the soul has an image, I think this is it.
I walked through the darkness as if it were the only natural thing,
It's like I'm already part of the darkness.
Quiet, peaceful, dawn.
On the day of market, I took lettuce to the market.
Lettuce and market are very common and tiny things, but they are by no means empty.
The cold beauty created by her precise poetic language makes the existence of individuals universal. Yes, the author is good at creating unique scenes with words.