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Pastoral without Nostalgia

2010; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/abr.2010.0022

2153-4578

Lynnell Edwards,

Rural development and sustainability

Pastoral without Nostalgia Lynnell Edwards (bio) Bucolics. Maurice Manning. Harcourt. http://www.harcourtbooks.com. 122 pages; cloth, $23.00. With his third book, Maurice Manning has made a startling and complex contribution to the long tradition of the pastoral, one that at once confirms the divine integrity of rural life while prodding the metropolitan reader into close self-examination. Conventionally, the argument of a bucolic (Virgil, Theocritus) is for the superiority of rural life over the urban. Not in classical literature a religious form, the bucolic, and its kin the eclogue and the idyll, is typically awash in frolicking satyrs and nymphs, shepherds and shepherdesses, often engaged in pagan rites. Christians reclaimed these pagan works by allegorizing a message of the Good Shepherd, though the fundamentally humanist value at their center persisted on through British neoclassicism (Edmund Spenser, Alexander Pope) and Romanticism, (John Clare) in a complex tradition that at once idealized the rural for urban audiences while complicating (particularly in Clare) the political realities of a diminishing rural culture. A more ancient tradition of the shepherd singing comes from the Psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the intimate and opaque God of David seems to be the most obvious model for Manning's "Boss" to which each of the untitled, unpunctuated, single stanza poems in this collection is addressed. But the equation of Manning's work with the Psalms of David is not entire. There are no lamentations of deep despair, nor petitions for a rain of coal and fire on the heads of his enemies. Neither are there exuberant cries of praise nor exhortations of great fear. Manning's speaker addresses, and most often questions, his Boss as he is moved by his observations of the rural world as he puzzles through his place in it. Manning's servant is made in the image of his Boss; they both enjoy a good joke, labor in the same field: you're a workhorse Boss like meyou work the pump I workthe bucket fair enoughwe're tough as leather Bosstough as nails we gotogether don't we... But he longs for a Boss who is silent: you get so hushed up Bossmy ears get lonely I wishyou'd let me hear from yousometime I wonder whatyou're up to Boss up there Who demands backbreaking and sometimes futile labor: I've dugthe rocks I've draggedthe heavy log around I've ironed it out all rightnot a wrinkle in sight Oisn't that enough Boss Who wearies his servant with riddling ambivalence: now I know behindthat cloud you've got your fingers crossedyou're hiding something Boss don't foolwith me is it a reason ora riddle I'm getting tired of allyour games I've had it up to here Who holds his servant's life in his hands: will I smell smoke before you shakethe light from me before you pinchmy little flame into a hiss. And, while the speaker's idiomatic phrasing and his preference for the literal may belie his education and place in the world, he is not simple. His figures and logic suggest a nascent metaphysics of the greater Natural Order. And he understands how the divine and the human are joined in Creation: you save a seed for me you sowit in the furrow of my eyeas if seedtime Boss is a little bitlike sleep I think inside my eyeyou keep a little patch of green. If Manning threatened to exhaust his well of rural and specifically central Kentucky imagery in A Companion for Owls (2004) (a book whose chief persona, D. Boone, is also troubled by the prospect of an ambivalent and fickle Creator), then in this collection he is marvelously inventive with the same pastoral imagery. The blackbird, the summer field, the stones, the river, the leaf swirling in the creek; the simple implements of agriculture: the hoe, a wagon wheel, the "salty harness," a bucket, a fence post; all strike the perfect idyllic note without lapsing into nostalgia. This is critical in constructing an uncompromised pastoral...