The Southern Review articles from January 1998

The Southern Review archives from January 1998

Waking. (poem)
January 1, 1998... When the girl from the Exxon guns her engine with the infuriated siren of her arthritic toe, it's certain I'm meant to awaken, if I am sleeping, and listen to those suddenly aroused pipes and rings and filters. I...

Woman by Woman. (poem)
January 1, 1998... I loved my crone grandmother, but she was not unimprovable; I touched her undressed body that splintered spring and thought of having sex. My grandmother had a child who came from her like blue statue and the lights...

Komodo.(poem)
January 1, 1998... The flight of a white cockatoo from tamarind to tamarind still in his mind's eye, one morning, Baron von Biberegg lay down like a streak of flowers in the dust. Lush mist, animal calls and birds sinking, the mind ...

The Ark upon His Shoulders.(poem)
January 1, 1998... My husband did all this. We used to live in a rambling kind of house with gossipy verandas. Then he bought a stove, an iron stove with a reservoir to it. He always insisted it was bad luck to come in that door and go out...

A Brief History of My Mother's Temper.(poem)
January 1, 1998... 1. We didn't want to make her mad. Formal spankings with the hairbrush were a justice we understood, but when her rage boiled over, that was when we knew we'd get scalded. Her...

Closing Down Her House.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Hers because she'd lived there seventy years, whereas at eighteen we'd left the Place, my brother and 1, now middle-aged men hurrying and crazy as thieves, our wives rushed and careless, going through her things, making...

Ago (Needle).(poem)
January 1, 1998... Amo amas amat: thus -- that which I've tattooed on my heart. I found yesterday the short black pieces of thread that were stitches, could have come from the balls of a matador gored by a bull, or those pulled out ...

Campo.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Can anyone tell me where the closest field of vision is? Here I am, an American of Polish descent, my head full of Tuscan campi cut into the side of Monte S'Egidio, recalling the English writer Langland's Piers...

Fourteen.(poem)
January 1, 1998... The trees were heavy with August. Even the shadows were green that morning I sat beside my aunt in the big pink sedan built for safety. Her mother-in-law had been dying for months, and my aunt wanted a day ...

Given and Received.(poem)
January 1, 1998... When April's grape tendrils tackle our small St. Francis, they knock him over when they only hope to use him as a brace. I find such undoing hard to face. Should I see the tendril...

Mortal Eternal.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Starfish rubble and sand on the floor of the community center, 50s music, so the kids had stayed home and we could shimmy without them rolling their eyes. Inside me, Meursault, and sperm still rippling their tails,...

The Hairs.(poem)
January 1, 1998... At 53, I start to save the hairs from my comb, and from the rug by the bureau, and to keep them in a bowl, and then, at night, when the wind is from the east, to loose them out the western window, over the park, for...

What it Meant.(poem)
January 1, 1998... I didn't know what it meant that he was born in the beauty of the lilies, maybe bulbs that had been planted around the timbers of the stable, or the myrrh king had brought them, or the frankincense king. But the kings came...

You Hear?(poem)
January 1, 1998... Back home mothers and black maids used to say You hear? to little children to make sure we listened to instruction: Quit fussing, you hear? or Keep out the kitchen, you hear? Don't cross the street, let go your sister's...

Copperhead.(poem)
January 1, 1998... The day the copperhead bit me I was reaching into dry, hissing leaves for the candy I'd dropped on my way to write by the sycamore. I was a child. What did I know? God whispered run, and I did like...

Ferocious Ode.(poem)
January 1, 1998... It tells you the name of the flower you love. It takes the shape of an old woman working a pitchfork in the hay of a garden growing voluptuously every day in your heart; that is to say it, being mysterious, is difficult to...

Twilgiht's Swimmer.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Having jumped finally into the river and drunk it up, his body floats for two days in May heat. Is found. Claimed. Cleaned, but not displayed. Is imagined. Now the sun rises over the resting ground, and new grass chirrs...

Mr. Parsky.(poem)
January 1, 1998... a mule hauling fluorescence through the stink of embalming fluid slapping shiny boxes singing brass gold silver handles silk-lined payment plans pillows dreaming an invoiced infinity with no...

Returning.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Whenever I say I, we echoes behind. Nothing we own belongs to us only. A cross over the collarbone. The body has everything to do with absence. Nothing ever enters through folded arms. Whenever I say I, we echoes...

A Photo of St. Therese of Lisieux Dressed as Joan of Arc, 1894.(poem)
January 1, 1998... I feel the call of an Apostle. I'd live to travel all over the world, making Your name known -- Therese Martin Before her sisters had gathered around the white linens of her bed and clipped her fingernails, ...

Clown.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Fevered, itch-mad, splotched from ear to toe, I heard the doctor solemn as a judge say, Chicken pox. I felt feathers in my throat and thought even morning math class must be better. No tumbler of iced ginger ale or...

Twister.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Season shifting, our pond taut as a drum, the meadow was heavy with crows. Every leaf was still. A stripe of green horizon tinted the evening, and then it came, a swirl of bats, a column of smoke, the...

At the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music & Culture Among Youth.(poem)
January 1, 1998... At the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music & Culture among Youth, Maestro plays a raga at dusk that means God is powerful enough, and we have our misery. It's true, though downtrodden, we talk to God. ...

What to Look for in a Man.(poem)
January 1, 1998... When I was younger, infatuations buried me. I searched for glamor or some rich element of his speech -- the je ne sais quoi of finesse, wit, strength, and drop-dead good looks. I loved his profession or another's clothes...

Pineapple.(poem)
January 1, 1998... In the white light midnight stop 'n' shop a woman asked me how to choose the pineapple best for eating right away, that night. She said she liked to suck the juice; her lips were full and puckered into smile....

Written on My Fiftieth Birthday.(poem)
January 1, 1998... I awake this morning, this second day of January now fifty-one times having come round and fallen on my shoulders, awake with the revolving zodiac's reproach and rise with all its cumulative anger calculating...

The People Who Own Pianos.(poem)
January 1, 1998... We never can find their fuckin' houses. We get a set of shit directions there, a different set of shit directions back. OK, we've got an attitude about the goddamn load no matter what we're told it is -- grand, baby, standup, damaged,...

El Musiquero.(poem)
January 1, 1998... After my brother Kent was killed by the Jarimallos and Alvarezes, I toured with Los Asesinos and lost everything there is to lose. The first thing I lost was my girlfriend. Though I told her she shouldn't, she wanted to come with me on...

After Rain.(poem)
January 1, 1998... Writers who thrive on the short-story form and rarely if ever write novels are at their best when challenged to seize upon the few "telling" details that will particularize without diminishing. A man in a story can be precisely described by...

The destiny of Nathalie X and Other Stories.
January 1, 1998... Writers who thrive on the short-story form and rarely if ever write novels are at their best when challenged to seize upon the few "telling" details that will particularize without diminishing. A man in a story can be precisely described by...

Leave it to Me.
January 1, 1998... Writers who thrive on the short-story form and rarely if ever write novels are at their best when challenged to seize upon the few "telling" details that will particularize without diminishing. A man in a story can be precisely described by...

The Untouchable.
January 1, 1998... Writers who thrive on the short-story form and rarely if ever write novels are at their best when challenged to seize upon the few "telling" details that will particularize without diminishing. A man in a story can be precisely described by...

The God of Small Things.
January 1, 1998... Writers who thrive on the short-story form and rarely if ever write novels are at their best when challenged to seize upon the few "telling" details that will particularize without diminishing. A man in a story can be precisely described by...

A talk with Lewis P. Simpson.(Interview)
January 1, 1998... Lewis P. Simpson is Boyd Professor and William A. Read Professor of English Literature, emeritus, at Louisiana State University. He is the author of many widely praised books, among them The Man of Letters in New England and the South, The...

James Dickey's Dear God of the wildness of poetry.
January 1, 1998... Dickey invokes this "Dear God of the wildness of poetry" in a poem of the '60s, "For the Last Wolverine." He liked poems about animals, the wilder the better. Doomed to extinction, the wolverine gnaws its prey and looks straight at eternity,...

Children writing grief.
January 1, 1998... If it is true, as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, that "Childhood is the kingdom where no one dies that matters," then for many of my students, the kingdom was vanquished early on. No matter where I traveled in fifteen years as...

Looking for Marlboro Jones. (slave from Civil War period)
January 1, 1998... It is June 11, 1864. Near Louisa Courthouse, VA, the South Carolina general Wade Hampton leads cavalry troops into what will become known as the Battle of Trevilian Station, one of the bloodiest engagements of the Civil War. During the day, a...

Where does a poet come from?
January 1, 1998... I spent the summer of 1996 at home in Atlanta. All around me the Olympics raged: the frenzy of preparations in late May, all of June, and early July, then the actual events and the Paralympics that quickly followed in August. From gymnastics...

Collected Poems.
January 1, 1998... The Title of Thomas Cahill's best-selling How the Irish Saved Civilization makes an extravagant claim, but the book's argument is both cogent and persuasive. Cahill credits the written word's survival as something more than a utilitarian...