The Southern Review articles from January 1996

The Southern Review archives from January 1996

The death of the father. (poem)
January 1, 1996... for Gerald The night before we put you in the ground, the gathered relatives wandered the motel parking lot, grief subsumed in wonder at the night leaping with pillars of pulsating lavender ice - the northern lights, a rare vision this far...

Looking for the baseball. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Look! Look! If you look really hard at things, you'll forget you're going to die. - Montgomery Clift If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? - Dogen 1. Somewhere out beyond the edge of...

The Giddings. (poem)
January 1, 1996... It is still and grave, here, now; the grass is summer-dense, and Constable's heady clouds consume the sky. Behind the hedgerows, spires shepherd along the past, with those interred beneath the stones of St. John's Church-the sacramental stones...

Paradise regained. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Rousseau's tawny tigers nosing through bright green spikes, the red starburst of bromeliads; this is the way the world ought to be on a winter day in Paris, Henri in the greenhouse sketching while snow drifts down on the Botanical Gardens....

Bearing you with them. (poem)
January 1, 1996... One follows a road like a dream, going back and forth, to and fro just for the strangeness of it, the oddity of light, the way the wind bends the field to its knees in the yellow blaze of autumn, the captain's house coming into view and the...

All the people in Hopper's paintings. (poem)
January 1, 1996... All the people in Hopper's paintings walk by me here in the-twilight the way our neighbors would stroll by of an evening in my hometown, smiling and waving as I leaned against the front-porch railing and hated them all and the place I had grown...

Phipps conservatory. (poem)
January 1, 1996... A dirigible of a building, It floats above the lily ponds And gardens, the long swale of lawns Across which shadows are passing Like summer clouds. I came here often, growing up, With my sketch-pads and paints, Trying to render pencil trees,...

St. Paul's Union Church and cemetery, Seiberlingsville, Pennsylvania. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Even their stones are frail, Their names dissolving In the slow caresses of weather As though once again They were giving up something of themselves. So the dead are shelved. Or, if you'd rather, They float on darkness In the pale skiffs of...

Coming again upon Mensch's Mill, by accident. (poem)
January 1, 1996... As though anyone's life fell back Through its own strange light, I am here again at evening, Watching nighthawks dart beneath The summer stars. We gathered here Years ago for the wedding of A friend's daughter, cars Filled with beer we drained...

Lost is the farthest place. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Even if they are lucky enough to make it to a town where someone else speaks English, it could be one of those lost towns, so small and short on pride it has no written history, one of those towns with a mountain that shadows it all day long,...

Sureley someone. (poem)
January 1, 1996... (1) Called home for supper, three children run across the road to an open door, and there they vanish. The fourth hides behind my front-yard tree. I know what the fourth is up to: she tastes the delicious idea of her absence heightening the...

Falling and crying. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Don't cry because you fall, you said, Father. Don't let the two be sisters. Don't be a sissy. Next time I fell, I spent my strength trying to be hurt quietly. I widened my eyes, froze their direction away from my stinging knee, but too late,...

At the all-night cafeteria. (poem)
January 1, 1996... The dark inside the movie theater is thinning, and I am left with my eyes filling with snow. There are acres of paved-over parking lots where I once lived. Nothing grows there. Black-and-white photographs press inside my wallet, eager to get...

The winged leper. (poem)
January 1, 1996... I am the shadow, the dancing doll of your drunken breath. At fifty, the stars know my name. And you, the faceless emigre of my heart, the one who consoled my mother when I was conceived, said you'd give me your name, divorce her the next day....

Jules Laforgue. (poet)
January 1, 1996... BIOGRAPHY JULES LAFORGUE was born in Uruguay on August 16, 1860. He emigrated to his parents' native France in 1869 and attended school in Tarbes until 1876. Then Laforgue entered the Lycee Fontanes in Paris, where he studied philosophy and...

Complaint of the pianos you hear in better neighborhoods. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Conduct the well-read, carefully nurtured soul, Pianos, pianos, through a better neighborhood On spring evenings, no overcoat, for a chaste stroll, To nerves that are shattered or misunderstood. Those children, of what do they dream With each...

Solo by moonlight. (poem)
January 1, 1996... I am smoking, sprawled beneath the sky, On the roof of the carriage, My carcass is jolted, my soul dances Like an Ariel; Without marriage or rage, my fine soul dances, O roads, hills, smoke, o valleys, My lovely soul, ah! let us sum up. We...

Santo spirito. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Above the terra-cotta roofs, swallows swoop, Stitching together the gathered dust of day. Above, humidity hangs like a hive. How surprised we are to find we live here, Here within our bodies. The air, downswept, Is fragrant: soot, sweat,...

The pilgrimage of my father's ghost. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Halfway home, he comes to the field's edge: Deadfall, goldenrod, a molder of uncut hay, A rose-thicket hedgerow skirting the verge, And beyond it, a decline into a ditch That part of the year fills as a creek, The water slow, moving beneath a...

After a quarrel in Fiesole. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Kindled by the cicada's worn-down flint, The heat lasts through to evening. The wind is a slub of resin and haze. The pines flare at the tip as the sun fades. If we can possess only what we renounce, Imagine all we will finally lose. The...

Remembering the field of the black birds. (poem)
January 1, 1996... 1 Honking madly, geese woke me From a dream of gridlocked traffic To a dawn full of change. They left Before the season's first sleet Rattled through oak leaves That will hang on till spring. Now, surprised grackles cloak the pines Across the...

Hawk drops reckless into air. (poem)
January 1, 1996... Hawks watchful In the tops Of barren trees Seem to fall into flight Their frightful claws Release the limb They drop reckless Onto the air Caught in the curve Of their wide wings Then they swoop At terrific speed Toward something We cannot...

In the minotaur's lair. (poem)
January 1, 1996... It's not as dark as we expected, these corridors filled with drippings and whispers we know should make sense, these passages so distanced from the flourishing air where we believed we belonged. We pass rooms crowded with ambiguous...

Provincetown, August 1994. (poem)
January 1, 1996... for Donna Roll I see us beneath the awning of the Blase Cafe, two middle-aged women in the stippled light of afternoon. His T-count has dropped, you say, and one image enters both our minds - all that youth and talent transposed to huge eyes...

The deposition of the prince of whales. (short story)
January 1, 1996... In the summer of 1880, he came. He came like all visions do, humping up out of the depths of sleep, breaking surfy spumes of dreams, his flukes slapping hard on the water, slapping me awake. My leviathan. I knew him instantly, the way one...

Men of character. (short story)
January 1, 1996... Foresters wear puttees, green or gray. This one never went anywhere without his rifle, just as he never went anywhere without being in a great hurry. When he came through the village he was always at a half-sprint, the dust stirring above his...

Solidarity in green. (short story)
January 1, 1996... When Michael Mallory planned their trip to Honduras, getting his brand-new stepson kidnapped by panhandling guerrillas did not figure in his calculations. In the years that followed Mallory's Peace Corps tour, the dirt-poor little country had...

See you in your dreams. (short story)
January 1, 1996... That first time, it was noon recess at school. A blowy autumn day. I was sitting on a bench in the playground with two other fifth-grade girls, eating our lunches out of paper bags, and this man appeared and stood watching us from about ten feet...

Half-life. (short story)
January 1, 1996... When I was growing up, my brother Peter was always asking questions. He'd follow me around with this puzzled, serious look on his face and wait until his big sister was ready to pay attention. "What's a half-brother?" he wanted to know once. He...

The brainwashing of Lemuel Gulliver.
January 1, 1996... Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library where you read the fading...

Eric Voegelin: reminiscences.
January 1, 1996... I first met Eric Voegelin in 1940 or 1941 when he came to Baton Rouge to lecture under the auspices of the Department of Government at Louisiana State University. He may have given a single lecture or a series, and the subject, I suppose, was...

Fighting battles one by one: Robert Penn Warren's 'Segregation.'
January 1, 1996... In a 1957 interview with Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison asked Warren to discuss "the exciting spiral" of his career as it moved from I'll Take My Stand (1930) to Segregation (1956). According to Ellison, "these works mark stages in a combat...

Tate, Lytle, and the New Criticism.
January 1, 1996... It is astonishing how most Americans know nothing of their own history. (Allen Tate to Andrew Lytle, 1929) If there's one truth of human relations above all others, it is that we are our brothers' keepers. I refuse to sit by and see you...

Eliot, Frazer, and the myhtology of modernism. (influence of anthropologist James Frazer on poet T.S. Eliot)
January 1, 1996... Back in the '50s, T. S. Eliot took the wind out of Eliot studies by describing his notes to The Waste Land as "a remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship." When Valerie Eliot published the original drafts of the poem in 1971, critics were quick...

Yeats in the real world. (poet and playwright William Butler Yeats)
January 1, 1996... Reading the third amazing volume of Yeats's Collected Letters - 692 pages' worth, written between 1901 and 1904 - one has a suddenly vivified sense of what Yeats was referring to a few years later in "The Fascination of What's Difficult": The...