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The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-Francois Millet David Middleton 1st edition
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The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-Francois Millet
David Middleton
In The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy, David Middleton celebrates the artist Jean-François Millet?s sympathetic realism depicting the harsh life of French peasants in the nineteenth century and honoring their essential human dignity. Millet referred to some of his drawings as Epopée des champs, "the epic of the fields." Here, Middleton follows Millet, picture by picture, in taking a lowly pastoral theme and elevating it to epic and tragedy. Middleton seeks to describe Gruchy?the small Norman village near Cherbourg where Millet grew up?and explore that rural world in relation to the American South and his own career as a Louisiana poet. A deep affirmation of the agrarian way of life, Middleton?s poems are an implicit critique of the postagrarian world entering its final stages of decay.
Reading The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy is like walking through a series of galleries of paintings, each poem a translation from one art form to the other.
The painting is unfinished, rightly so, For it depicts what never has an end: A fat hog on her haunches pushed and drawn Out of the barn to this small walled-in place,
Two men pulling a rope tied round the snout, And a woman coaxing, showing the beast A bucket?s tilted lip of slop and corn, November?s emblem, bleak with our bleak need.
The hog has caught the scent of other hogs On the butcher?s stained apron and she squeals So near the slaughter-board, the primal scene, The long knife and the basin for the blood.
Huddled and wrapped against a wall and cold, Two ghostly children?charcoal, not pastel? Appalled yet famished, fix on death and ham, This open abattoir, hunger?s great I AM. ?"Killing the Hog, ca. 1867?70"
80 pages
| Media | Books Paperback Book (Book with soft cover and glued back) |
| Released | December 15, 2005 |
| ISBN13 | 9780807130810 |
| Publishers | Louisiana State University Press |
| Pages | 80 |
| Dimensions | 164 × 191 × 8 mm · 109 g |
| Language | English |
