美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Blackacre': A Collection Of Poems About 'Searching And Being Buffeted'

'Blackacre': A Collection Of Poems About 'Searching And Being Buffeted¹'

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Monica Youn's new collection of poems "Blackacre" takes its title from a 17th-century legal term. Our reviewer Tess Taylor says Youn turns the legalese into poetry.

TESS TAYLOR, BYLINE³: As well as being one of the most consistently innovative⁴ poets working today, Monica Youn is a Yale-trained lawyer. And so as all lawyers do, she learned in property law that blackacre is a centuries-old legal term that stands in for a fictitious⁵ estate.

In legal practice, positing⁶ a blackacre has been used to explore laws about easements or environmental rights or whether or not farmer A will eventually owe farmer B potatoes. This might be a bit far afield from poetry, but in this case, the estate Youn is looking to claim is the estate of the body, specifically the body that wants to conceive a child.

In this book, both the body of the speaker and of the longed-for child are held up as fictions, sites that can be thought about and named but may or may not be wholly claimable at all. This means that Youn is essentially⁷ writing a study of longing⁸ for something at once internal and out of control, something highly envisioned that may never come to pass.

What does it mean to imagine claiming something as strange as a baby or, for that matter, a self? What, in the end, does it mean to hope? These are open questions, and Youn mines them with precise skill. As she circles ideas of barrenness and fertility, Youn unsettles the way we imagine our possessions, interiors or borders at all. What is the work of desire? What slips away even as we try to name it? Glancing off mythic landscapes, slipping by Homer and Milton, Youn's poems also thread through, as she puts it, radiant squares of sensation, the body a dichotomy of flesh and blood. At what point does this lacework shift over from intricacy to impossibility, she asks?

Youn's poems, luminous⁹ fictions, also capture the sheer force of imagining itself, the slippery elusive¹⁰ loops of desire. Youn writes, it is almost unseemly - this exalting¹¹ - the maypole the seed has made of its body.

SIEGEL: That's Tess Taylor reviewing "Blackacre." It's the newest collection of poems by Monica Youn. Tess Taylor's most recent book is "Work And Days."

1 buffeted   

反复敲打( buffet的过去式和过去分词 )； 连续猛击； 打来打去； 推来搡去

参考例句：

• to be buffeted by the wind 被风吹得左右摇摆
• We were buffeted by the wind and the rain. 我们遭到风雨的袭击。

2 browser   

n.浏览者

参考例句：

• View edits in a web browser.在浏览器中看编辑的效果。
• I think my browser has a list of shareware links.我想在浏览器中会有一系列的共享软件链接。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 innovative   

adj.革新的，新颖的，富有革新精神的

参考例句：

• Discover an innovative way of marketing.发现一个创新的营销方式。
• He was one of the most creative and innovative engineers of his generation.他是他那代人当中最富创造性与革新精神的工程师之一。

5 fictitious   

adj.虚构的，假设的；空头的

参考例句：

• She invented a fictitious boyfriend to put him off.她虚构出一个男朋友来拒绝他。
• The story my mother told me when I was young is fictitious.小时候妈妈对我讲的那个故事是虚构的。

6 positing   

v.假定，设想，假设( posit的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Involves a contrast-a positing of walks that are opposites. 给我们看见强烈的对照﹕两种完全相反的生活样式。 来自互联网
• Global Positing System (GPS) technology has been widely used in many field. 全球定位系统(GPS)技术已经在许多领域得到广泛的应用。 来自互联网

7 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。

8 longing   

n.（for）渴望

参考例句：

• Hearing the tune again sent waves of longing through her.再次听到那首曲子使她胸中充满了渴望。
• His heart burned with longing for revenge.他心中燃烧着急欲复仇的怒火。

9 luminous   

adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的

参考例句：

• There are luminous knobs on all the doors in my house.我家所有门上都安有夜光把手。
• Most clocks and watches in this shop are in luminous paint.这家商店出售的大多数钟表都涂了发光漆。

10 elusive   

adj.难以表达(捉摸)的；令人困惑的；逃避的

参考例句：

• Try to catch the elusive charm of the original in translation.翻译时设法把握住原文中难以捉摸的风韵。
• Interpol have searched all the corners of the earth for the elusive hijackers.国际刑警组织已在世界各地搜查在逃的飞机劫持者。

11 exalting   

a.令人激动的，令人喜悦的

参考例句：

• To exert an animating, enlivening, encouraging or exalting influence on someone. 使某人充满活力，对他进行启发，鼓励，或施加影响。
• One of the key ideas in Isaiah 2 is that of exalting or lifting up. 以赛亚书2章特点之一就是赞颂和提升。