The Literary Review articles from June 1998

The Literary Review archives from June 1998

Brownout. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Nightly brownouts in the Philippines always bring out exchanges of horror stories and myths which comprise female characters in different states of mutilation. At night, the light goes out. Old men gather the...

Fairytale. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Jorinde, come in the snailhouse. There we both will gorge On baked domouse in rubbish and mildew-fungus mousse. I slaughtered there the gold pheasant, In the kettle my hedgehog stews. And there you drink milk...

Snowy owl. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Ten years old, I climbed stone fences, side-stepped down hills rough with ice. Sparrows moved in the branches of pines but I was after the rare bird, ghost owl blown off course by a storm. I tell you this so you will...

The tongues of fish. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Gutted, the fish does a flap-jack dance while the blond boy steps on it with his Nikes, its eyes popping like a Budweiser can. There is a pandemonium everywhere. The old lady shrieks at how blood sticks...

A handful of nails. (short story)
June 22, 1998... Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact, which I grated meticulously as if it were a hard cheese. At my most desperate, I've had to do such things because my children, like most...

Night vision. (poem)
June 22, 1998... What for the visions of the night? Our life is so safe and regular that we hardly know the emotion of terror.... And yet dreams acquaint us with what the day omits. --Ralph Waldo Emerson In the small park...

Portrait. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Now I'm going to paint a great canvas-- what I want to do is a self-portrait. Here I draw the heart--a matchstick head, here, the brain--a machine concrete and sacred. Somewhere will be the defenseless nose, the mouth, ...

Holy orders. (poem)
June 22, 1998... -- After "Jo In Wyoming" by Edward Hopper I dabble with my brush across the mountain side, the trees, steep cliffs--no rush to get it right. The ride out here was good, out past the swaying plains of wheat...

To forgive her. (poem)
June 22, 1998... She was born on your doorstep, baptized in the strand of your porchlight. Let her in. She's the person you see climbing every step at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre on tarnished knees. She knows not what...

Another note to the young. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Change accumulates. My body, still tall, slows, thickens. One thing that happens, love takes hold and acts, somehow like gravity, by curving space around the body's tiny masses. Well, my electrons don't care. They do as...

Birthday song. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Neutrinos--In fact more than a billion of them passed harmlessly and unnoticed through your body in the time it took to read this sentence. --The Christian Science Monitor Saddened by the mirror's bulging...

Marigolds. (poem)
June 22, 1998... On the fourth day the nausea can't keep down a drop of water, the dry heaves have intimately acquainted me with my plumbing, but mind is forcing gut to just barely not flinch; on the couch, staring at a juice glass full of...

Summer garden. (poem)
June 22, 1998... --After Anna Akhmatova I want to see the roses in the park of my childhood where I played as young as the newly formed statues there. Rain drops tiptoe in puddles that grow as we splash. We...

Sangre. (short story)
June 22, 1998... It was on his shirt, on his shoulder. The brightness of it had faded, along with his fear of it. Now it was brown, a circle on the white cloth, no longer real blood, and as fiat as Delia's eyes, above her beard. "Is that your blood?" ...

Rural routes. (poetry)
June 22, 1998... We ride the roads our fathers rode and pass by Liberty, Teanaway, Kittitas on rural routes hypnotic as algebra repeating themselves in the rear view. We pull off by property posted Privit. No Huntin. Dont Ask. ...

488. (poem)
June 22, 1998... My father and Irving, who would ultimately drown, and uncle Shep, who was not really my uncle--all three who would be up fishing at five, snored ravenously in their primitive beds lined up one by one on the screened in...

Uncle. (poem)
June 22, 1998... I'm older than you will ever be, Uncle, dead the year of my birth. You closed your eyes at the bris, a seer, and swore the child will be a scholar. Perhaps it was then my father, that unlettered scholar of...

Wild ducks floating by. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Under spruce trees with roots dangling from a cutbank, under the thunder, our son slumbers in a tent on public land in Montana. A river flows by his flap with trout and sometimes trees: it is swift, here, millions of years...

The dance school. (short story)
June 22, 1998... In 1948 when I was thirteen and living in Curacao, a ballroom dancing champion from The Netherlands came to the island and in a flurry of publicity opened a dance school. Articles in the newspaper proclaimed this yet another bounty for the colony...

Getting past words: poems from a thousand years of the Zen tradition.
June 22, 1998... One of the things that set Zen Buddhism (called Ch'an in China, where it originated) apart from the many other forms of Buddhist religious and spiritual practice was its conscious appeal to lay practitioners. Strongly influenced by the writings...

Autumn path. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Fir, bamboo, And pure shade merge. The mind follows A lazy walk. A chill Springs up just When rain has passed. Stillness stretches out. Monks Suddenly return. Bug tracks Trail into obscure...

Living in poverty. (poetry)
June 22, 1998... In my mountain kitchen Are blue moss tracks on the stove. Dust fills up the almsbowl. There isn't any food. A pity Mice and sparrows Haven't learned about poverty yet, Drilling into the room, drilling ...

Abode of the unplanned effect. (poem)
June 22, 1998... The grass-covered path is secluded and still; a closed door faces the Chungnan Mountains. In the evening, the air's chilly, but the light rain stops; at dawn, far off, a few cicadas start. Leaves...

Written at the dwelling of a recluse. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Even though you have a brushwood door, it hasn't been shut for a long time; A few clouds, a few trees have been your only companions. Still, I suspect if you stay longer, people will learn of this spot; We'll...

Five poems. (poetry)
June 22, 1998... A hundred thousand worlds are flowers in the sky a simple mind and body are moonlight on the water once the cunning ends and transformations stop at that moment there is no place for thought The shade of noble trees...

To show you all, on the first morning of the year. (poem)
June 22, 1998... A thousand thousand worlds, a single breath, one turn of the Great Potter's Wheel. The withered tree blossoms in a Spring beyond illusion. Pop! The firecrackers bring me back: the laugh's on me. ...

Facing snow and writing what my heart embraces. (poem)
June 22, 1998... At Mount Ssu-ming in the cold in the snow half a lifetime's bitter chanting. Beard hairs are easy to pluck out one by one: a poem's words are hard to put together, Pure vanity to vent the...

On the spot where Shih-chia Tzu sits in meditation. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Ten thousand trees cold forest as I came up through the blue greens of the hillside. Wafting in the wind white crane, my feathery head a long time beyond scheming. The sound of the stream is, after all,...

After the rebellion, visiting West Mountain Temple. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Pines charred, temple wrecked, all from the fighting; valleys transformed, ridges shifting--unbelievable events!(*) Among clouds for the first time I meet the new head priest, on the stone surface spy inscriptions from earlier...

Start of autumn: hearing a cicada while sick in bed. (poem)
June 22, 1998... On my pillow little by little waking, suddenly I hear a single cicada cry-- at that moment I know I have not died, though past days are like a former existence. I want to go to the window, listen closer, but even...

Up after illness, I watch the idle clouds. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Up after illness, I watch the idle clouds crowding together in the sky, then parting, pausing, lingering as though laughing at me-- I could never match your twists and turnings! You collide with rocks but leave not a...

Song of the spring wind. (poem)
June 22, 1998... What does the spring wind have in mind, coming day and night to these groves and gardens? He never asks who owns the peaches and damsons but blows away their crimson without a word.

After Han-shan. (poem)
June 22, 1998... a charge to students of the Tao: "nothing to do; nothing to lose" among the flowers, darkening clouds entering the pines, a sinking sun spring deepens with urgent birdcalls autumn declines before the cries of insects...

166. (poem)
June 22, 1998... autumn mountains: brocades of light the clouds: endless beauty I lean on my staff, contemplate crimson leaves silent: as the birds streaming above me

After Shih-te. (poem)
June 22, 1998... I climb these hills as if walking on air body too light to fall bamboo staff resting against a great stone torn cloak snapping in the wind a lone bird soars the azure depths far distant springs reflected in its eye...

Four haiku. (poem)
June 22, 1998... The sea grinds down small Slow but sure, grist to its mill Stones, pebbles to sand Carried far inland The rhythm of the sea, stilled Into the mountains The sea's devotions Prostrating themselves in surf...

The persistence of the moment. (short story)
June 22, 1998... I arrived at nine in the evening--dusk was coming on--in the middle of August at the upper end of a Swiss high mountain valley that cuts into the Valois Alps close to the Italian border. The village, which is visited during the summer by hikers...

Proof of angels in this world. (poem)
June 22, 1998... The bombs, the old man said. Releasing them in the air over Italian towns had seemed a revelation. Angels, he said, must have looked down and believed the earth was finally blooming. And it was, he said. The bombs lifted...

About angels. (poem)
June 22, 1998... See how the first houseflies already fly about! Floating in the wet grass are bits of sun. In May, the angels who had nested in the south, Like sinful ideas in our heads, are cropping up. Angels play the role of the...

Baccus sees Ariadne. (poem)
June 22, 1998... He felt as he watched her nude and penetrable sleep the slow story of desire woven through her dreams, flesh pressing flesh--the warm glowing coals of her imagination, her head bent back and on her breath the...

Slipping into bed. (poem)
June 22, 1998... I. I listen to my heartbeat, to my breath, to my wife's breathing beside me, and I think, every night, of my father, a thousand miles to the north, breathing toward sleep, of my children breathing on the other side of the house. I listen...

After twenty years. (poem)
June 22, 1998... When Odysseus built his bridal bed, for posts he took a living olive tree. He mortised through the rough grey bark, the fragile cambium, and drove the tenon fast to the quick sapwood. Around the bed he built a bridal...

A week before we moved away. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Can music really come from its notes? Can this peace come from these words? The pictures are subdued, in tattoo colors, the twilight, no lights on yet, like water. In the blue room Janine reads to Spencer, who...

Morgenstern's wound. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Morganstern's affair carved a wound in him that never healed-- it wasn't completely debilitating, but when the liaison evaporated, he was left with a wrenched gut & gaping cleft. Judy, who spoke fluent Chinese...

Two adventure stories. (short story)
June 22, 1998... Whom do you flee, madman? Even gods have lived in these woods. --Virgil, Eclogue II, 60 Sun up. Mid-summer. White orb touched the tops of pines lining the Nemunas River. Paul Rood, the American, closed his Viking Portable...

Never just words: a conversation with Anthony Piccione.(Interview)
June 22, 1998... Anthony Piccione was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and raised on Long Island. He is the author of several limited editions and three book-length collections of poetry: Anchor Dragging, Seeing It Was So, and For the Kingdom, all published by BOA...

Writing Southern fiction.
June 22, 1998... If southern novels are a distinctive sub-genre of American literature, it is because the South as a region is distinctly different from the rest of the country. It is different in its geographical, climatic, and demographical features; it is...

Birthday Letters. <Subdivision> (book reviews)</Subdivision>
June 22, 1998... The publication earlier this year of birthday letters, Ted Hughes's powerful, intimate sequence of poems about his relationship with his late wife Sylvia Plath, caught the literary world off-guard. After thirty-five years of aggressive silence...

Black Zodiac. <Subdivision> (book reviews)</Subdivision>
June 22, 1998... The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God. --Spinoza, Proposition XXIV Part V of the Ethics Under his definition of love (Ethics Pt III), Spinoza explains that every individual detail of the natural world is...

37. (poem)
June 22, 1998... study the Way and never grow old distrust emotions; truth will emerge sweep away your worries set even your body aside autumn drives off the yellow leaves yet spring renews every green bud quietly contemplate...