The Southern Review articles from January 1993

The Southern Review archives from January 1993

Fee, fie, faux Faulkner: parody and postmodernism in southern literature. (William Faulkner)
January 1, 1993... In an essay he titled "The Closure of History in a Postsouthern America," Lewis Simpson concludes that "(t)he epiphany of the southern literary artist will not be repeated. The Southern Renascence will not come again." Simpson reached this...

Fathers and sons in the fiction of Reynolds Price: a sense of crucial ambiguity.
January 1, 1993... Since the 1962 publication of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, which not only won the Faulkner Award but was also printed in its entirety in Harper's, Reynolds Price has been a visible presence in contemporary American letters, yet for...

Mirroring the racial "other": the Deacon and Quentin Compson in William Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury.'
January 1, 1993... In the sound and the fury, race is an ideational construct that, in the African-American vernacular, "worries" the text and at the same time determines its meaning in crucial ways. What makes race problematic is, in part, implied in Mikhail...

A play of abstractions: race, sexuality, and community in James Baldwin's 'Another Country.'
January 1, 1993... Of the many blindnesses that have characterized critical readings of James Baldwin's work, one of the most consistent has been the critical failure to consider seriously the lack of continuity uniting the persona of racial spokesman that...

Lessons in race, dialogue, and profanity.
January 1, 1993... I think that the writing of good dialogue is probably the most difficult technique to accomplish in the art of fiction writing (or, of course, in writing for the stage or screen). I wrote on my own for two years, without any instruction or...

In another country: Jean Stafford's literary apprenticeship in Baton Rouge.
January 1, 1993... Among the extensive Jean Stafford materials at the University of Colorado, Boulder, are notes for an unpublished essay entitled "Baton Rouge." Typed on thin, yellowing paper with some passages reworked again and again, the manuscript is easy to...

My mother's shoes. (short story)
January 1, 1993... A boy of twelve, the year my father was dying, I used to go out to the garage during the summer evenings, just after dusk, and put on a pair of my mother's high heels. I found them in a grocery sack of my sisters' and my outgrown clothes to be...

Mary's departure. (short story)
January 1, 1993... The slick gray stones poked out of the cliff like the polished claws of an animal. Below, the green Atlantic swirled and sent sprays of water into the air. The water could not reach Mary Flarity, who sat in her rocky alcove pondering her double...

The cemetery. (short story)
January 1, 1993... She was taking a walk, alone, working her way up a knoll through the scattered pines and cedars and the bare hardwoods that rose toward the November sky, when she came upon the faded marble and granite stones. They looked like gray and white...

The flying hawk. (short story)
January 1, 1993... Miss Eulalia Potts, librarian, was fond of dimming the lights four times - three short dims and then a long, like the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth. Fate knocking at the door, whatever. She wished to forewarn the heavy readers with a touch...

Stationary rape. (short story)
January 1, 1993... By any measure, except god's, Cyrus Packer's only success in life was the consistency of his failure. Even his face betrayed him. Past forty, he looked sixty. A widower for ten years, he had never owned a thing except his hard luck, his anger...

Elegy for my brother. (poem)
January 1, 1993... I'll walk awhile, maybe as high as the tree line - The tick-infested heads of those deer, their silhouettes Over the fields, gave me courage somehow To speak with you. I awoke, did You know, just as you died. Later I was told That it rained...

The man. His bowl. His raspberries. (poem)
January 1, 1993... The bowl he starts with is too large. It will never be filled. Nonetheless, in the moist dawn, reaching underneath the leaf, he frees each raspberry from its stem and white nipples remain suspended. He is being gentle, so does not think...

Man and woman in landscape. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Instead of emptiness, a low moan or a blue note from a swallow. . . . Conversation stopped miles back where the road opens onto a tapestry of seamless green. And with eyes red, chests heaving, they walk two, maybe three hours across the...

Resistance. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Days after the storm, this unsought fog holds fireworks' aftersmoke while streetlights blink a wasteful orange, forgetful of clocks. Yellow and pale and brown, our hectic walk to school fills with fragmented leaves, faces passing, familiar...

Working from home. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Watching, through the open French doors and conservatory glass, these birds queueing at the feeder, pecking and spitting out nuts and seeds, submissively anointing their forefeathers in the drinking bowl, I tidy a table, content with what's...

Pumpkin lust. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Like us, the squashes in the garden, battered by rain, have grown bulbous, warty, speckled and rayed, mushy where they sat too long. Surrounded by men in tall red hats, the pope declares married couples can commit adultery even with each other...

Something not there. (poem)
January 1, 1993... On television the coyote scoots off the cliff but hangs, his scrawny body running in place, not knowing nothing's beneath him, only falling after he looks down. As my daughter lies on the couch, I look at her inverted body and am surprised to...

In Pobiddy, Georgia. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Three women climb from the car in which they have driven slowly into the churchyard. They come toward us, to see what we are doing. What we are doing is reading the strange, wonderful names of the dead. One of the women speaks to us - after we...

Warblers. (poem)
January 1, 1993... In May, in the starry maples, in the foiled leaves, all day a small black-and-white bird floats along the branches and occasionally opens its beak to utter a modest song - six or seven notes, all on a level, as if someone somewhere had tapped...

Love in the time of cholera. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Those of us who have grown addicted to long, long-distance sighs, static-filled gaps over a telephone can still remember the reenactable, lingering potency of the old-fashioned billet-doux. They understand fully the difference between "Dear"...

In flower: iv. dandelions. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Some Viking's blond shock; one flare of sun on glass across our suburban clipped lawn; one settler, two, and then the gray-haired, smoke-soft afterburst remains: a spook transmitter disperses intermittent sniping till the whole broad yard...

In flower: v. narcissus. (poem)
January 1, 1993... A gold tall teacup on its splayed-out saucer offering no handle nothing to the lip but sheer form; or yellow Deco telephone that answers nothing back, yet if you'd learned its cipher, could thread your question down dark circuits to the center...

Crabapple. (poem)
January 1, 1993... All day long I've been thinking about the crabapple tree that was shedding its blossoms last April when my father was dying. I've wanted to describe the magic of a fruit tree in blossom. You may say the tree is a spring snow cascading to...

Omission. (poem)
January 1, 1993... A man opens the chest with his wife's old letters. He can't help it; like the ripe plums she left In the crisper, it's there and she isn't. She has driven to stay with a dying friend, And for the first time in years he's alone, The house dark...

Bio 7. (poem)
January 1, 1993... The year of their ultimate squalor, Of my father's gum-chewing brunette With the legs and the split-quartz-gray eyes, Of my mother's overall violence, her premature And less than sentimental eulogies for him, Was the year of their separation....

The brother I never had. (poem)
January 1, 1993... I often forget you among the actual, The women and ambitions that flit before me. But that year I wished for you constantly, Curled in my mind as in a science book My father showed me once, like prawns On ice in carts along the bay. For six...

Via del tritone. (poem)
January 1, 1993... In Rome, on the street of that name, I was walking alone in the sun In the noonday heat, when I saw a house With shutters closed, the sight of which Pained me so much, I could have Been born there and left inconsolably. The ochre walls,...

With Charles and Holly at Giubbe Rosse in Florence. (poem)
January 1, 1993... He's a wise man who conquers hope, For himself and the world, And savors the here and now Bent over a plate of gnocchi In this cafe where every customer Works the same steaming dish, Of which every spoonful, plainly, Is worth licking thoroughly...

Feast day. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Millions were dead; everybody was innocent. I stayed in my room. The President Spoke of war as of a magic love potion. My eyes were opened in astonishment. In a mirror my beard appeared to me Full of small twisting serpents. Just then...

Men deified because of their cruelty. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Is it true tyrants have long fingers? Is it true that they set their own traps Beneath paintings of the Madonna In gloomy palaces turned into museums? We all love her feverish eyes raised to heaven. We all love the naked Venus too. She's...

At a low point. (poem)
January 1, 1993... The curtain of ebb tide lifts along the strand revealing spaghetti heaps of lugworm now burrowed safely in sand. Black & blue ocean-beaten mussels close as hermit crabs retreat to their cells of empty whelk shells. Beached, pea-podded...

Persephone in Nebraska. (poem)
January 1, 1993... The rash crocuses, up since mid-February, stretch and unfurl beside the snowdrops; variegated tulip leaves spike the softened air and channel the sun into their throats. Spring is early again, by a month or more, and the ice-storms that...

Beaded tongue and groove. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Homage to a kind of loving, its best pleasure hidden, over and over on the walls, the ceiling, across the porch, where three cane rockers wave in the longer breeze or storm's approach. The surface boards, narrow like all thoroughbreds, would be...

Likely. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Magnolia bloom can sex the air until one thinks for long blanknesses only magnolia, magnolia. The tree shakes with the climbing of two girls. The taller, stretched among four branches, looks up, carrying a knife. The other settles at a lesser...

Turtle hunter. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Fingers and forearms terrified and chill, I grabbled blind in the murky water for the sawtooth edges of carapace, caught desperate hold, tussled and flung into the boat the raging snapper I'd trod up from the cobbled bottom, scabrous, ...

Farewell to the sea. (poem)
January 1, 1993... I would not say goodbye on a fine day, a day of ripplings and of sun-warmed sand, the sea a mere accompaniment to land, with gentle fingers on its harp, the bay. When all is shimmering in interplay - gulls, water, scribblings in the seaweed's...

Body of night. (poem)
January 1, 1993... If men and women, turning together in sleep, imitate some ancient rhythm, it must be this one, the sea's at night, the pull and counterpull I am staring into. The beach is too calm here, the beachwalkers are gone whose silhouettes in couples I...

Rites of passage. (poem)
January 1, 1993... It wasn't a question of the traffic though it was Friday and five-thirty, the hour most of us consider ourselves free. The cars, backed-up, stacked up ahead of me, to either side, the rainbow of them so muted and pastel they could have been a...

Eureka. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Here was no place for illumination the cotton dust thick window-strained light. The metal squall drowned what could not be shouted everything geared warping and filling. Though surely there were some times that he paused my grandfather...

Certificate. (poem)
January 1, 1993... The thick, cream-colored paper, stiff with age, is conjured from its uncapped mailing tube. My friend unrolls it on the tablecloth like a disused drumhead; one curling end keeps scrolling up on him until we help. We anchor its four corners with...

Thinking of Home: William Faulkner's Letters to His Mother and Father, 1918-1925.
January 1, 1993... Faulkner's Family Letters In his 1974 biography, Joseph Blotner presented William Faulkner's boyhood as largely happy. Later biographers and pseudobiographers have tried to deflate that rosy picture. Their logic is that if Faulkner...

Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay.
January 1, 1993... "Dense Poems and Socratic Light" David Middleton in his scrupulously edited The Collected Poems of John Finlay has brought together from scattered sources including letters and diaries all the poems John Finlay has written. It is the...

The Fever of the Years: A Collection of Caribbean and American Stories.
January 1, 1993... T(h)reading the Causeways of History With a haunting signature for his title, the St Vincent-born (West Indies) writer E. B. Baisden adds his unmistakable postmodern voice to the distinguished literary record of...

Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell.
January 1, 1993... The Interplay of Theory and Rhetoric in Myth In his pioneering work The Tangled Bank the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman analyzes four natural and social scientists as "imaginative writers." He studies the writings of Charles...