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  3. Poetry goes to the backwater to refresh itself as often as it goes to the ma

Poetry goes to the backwater to refresh itself as often as it goes to the ma

游客2023-12-06  27
问题     Poetry goes to the backwater to refresh itself as often as it goes to the mainstream, a fact that partly explains the appeal of Les Murray, the celebrated "bush bard" of Bunyah, New South Wales, Australia. The son of a poor farmer, Murray, who was not schooled formally until he was nine, is now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets. Because in Murray’s poetry you learn, for example, that there exists such a thing as the "creamy shitwood tree," he has been mistaken for a neutral cartographer of far-flung places. But the key to Murray, what makes him so exasperating to read one minute and thrilling the next, is not landscape but rage. "How naturally random recording edges into contempt," Murray writes, identifying the poles of his own combustible poetic temperament.
    Murray’s poems, never exactly intimate and often patrolled by details and place-names nearly indecipherable to an outsider, reflect a life lived selfconsciously and rather flamboyantly off the beaten track. Murray has always been associated with the land in and around Bunyah, where Aborigines harvested wild yams before Murray’s own people, "bounty migrants" from Scotland, displaced them in 1848. His childhood was marked by "lank poverty, dank poverty," a condition enforced by his grandfather, who kept Murray’s parents in a brutal. resentful tenancy sharecroppers, in essence, on their own ancestral lands. Murray’s biographer, Peter Alexander, describes a slab house with a shingle roof and a floor of stamped earth covered by linoleum, sunlight streaking "through the generous gaps in the walls." Perhaps no major English poet since John Clare grew up in such destitution, and, like Clare, Murray enjoys the "hard names" associated with being poor: "rag and toe-jam, feed and paw."
    We associate the depiction of rural life with pastoral, a mode that was shaped by city sensibilities for city audiences. Pastoral is a sophisticated game pitting poets against earlier poets, like a chess match played across time. No poet writing about the natural world entirely opts out of the game, but Murray’s poetry of elk and emus, bougainvillea and turmeric dust, comes close. For the sheer scarcity of its flora and fauna, this pastoral feels pretty far off the Virgilian grid. No poet who was "kept poor," as Murray believes he and his parents were, sees "nature" droughts and floods, the relentless summer heat on an uninsulated iron roof in celebratory terms. Indeed, since the poverty that Murray suffered was an enforced poverty, it is hard even to see "nature" in natural terms. Nature, for him, is the field where human motives, often sinister, play out.
    If you’ve been as poor as Murray was, "fate" can come to be synonymous with "what people do to you." The great struggle in his work is therefore between what Whitman calls the "Me myself" and what Murray calls the "Them and He." Murray’s poems tell an old story the indignity that a small person and those he loved suffered at the hands of big, corrupt people, a long time ago but they tell it with a ferocity that sharpens the farther away from the source the poet travels. You need to be a little bit of a lunatic to bear the specific, outsized grudges Murray has borne through his sixties, when all kinds of attention including Alexander’s fine biography(published in 2000), hundreds of articles and favorable reviews, and an invitation to write a new preamble to the Australian constitution have come his way. And, indeed, there is always something demented about Murray’s poems: even at their most painstakingly rational, it is as though, to quote Dickinson, "a plank in Reason, broke."
    Rant-poems crop up everywhere in Murray: graffiti by other means, these blunt, scrawled mottoes arc abandoned, like graffiti, the minute they get made. Murray has the habit of comparing people and things he dislikes to Nazis including, most famously, in a poem called "Rock Music." sex: Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew this at your school. To it, everyone’s subhuman for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives. You’ll be one of those if these things worry you. [br] "Sex is a Nazi" in the last paaragraph is a
选项 A、personalization.
B、simile.
C、metaphor.
D、exaggeration.
答案 A
解析
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