The Southern Review articles from January 2002

The Southern Review archives from January 2002

Remarks delivered at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, October 13, 2001.
January 1, 2002... for Lewis P. Simpson SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, I FIND MYSELF recurring to the opening passage of one of Melville's stories, in which a ship captain is awakened with the news that an unidentified vessel is approaching--whether with friendly or...

My Heart Never Understood Biology.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... My Heart Never Understood Biology The nuns didn't let us dissect God's creatures; there were no preserved pig fetuses, no thawed worms, no sharp knives. We had books, the heart splayed on open pages. And I...

Turning Thirty-Six.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Turning Thirty-Six I've never told the story of my mourning body. It's not much of a story. It's a sickbed story made of graveyard refuse. I achieved my mourning body with sorrow and starvation and blotch. I...

Late August.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Late August You know that trailer-trash blue people bring themselves to believe will brighten trim in the summer heat? I was painting over a self-induced dose of it in the side yard, my screen door ...

New Roosevelt Sculpture Includes Wheelchair.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... The National Park Service has added a sculpture of F. D. R. in a wheelchair at the entrance to his popular monument. --Associated Press America, thanks to a conspiracy of reporters and photogs, saw him only from the waist...

The Blue Buick: a Narrative.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... The Blue Buick: a Narrative I read the Classics in an English edition; but I would also relax by unrolling a map of the sky on a big table and covering each constellation with precious stones from our coffers, marking the...

The James Street Bus.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... All of us will lose our youth, and some of us, alas, have lost it already, but not all of us will pin the loss on Henry James. I, however, do. I blame Henry James. --Cynthia Ozick ("The Lesson of the Master") Henry James, I've...

The Resurrection Manual.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... The Resurrection Manual At Gettysburg, touring, I meet A businessman struck by lightning Who says, leaving the Peach Orchard, He occasionally forgets Where his next sentence is heading, His speech creeping down a...

Lewis Hine: Two Photographs.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Lewis Hine: Two Photographs 1. Washing at the Bosh Stripped to the waist and bathed in light So physical the flesh seems compacted of it, He bends above the bosh, washing his hands, Which are gleaming and black with...

Giacometti Sculptures: Carnegie Museum of Art.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Giacometti Sculptures: Carnegie Museum of Art As if the light itself were caustic, They stand against a wall in the museum, His little battery of statues, bodies slim As cotter pins, while out on the floor Beyond...

Steel Engravings.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Steel Engravings 1. Slag Banks Nightly you'd see it, halfway up the sky, That fissure of fire where the ladle cars Tipped over, stoking the smoldering banks, And below, where the glass of the river Cast it back....

William Gladstone Remembers.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... William Gladstone Remembers No, not the politics, not the mostly endless luncheons with the queen (and anyway, she hated me in the end, or even earlier). Not the clashes across the verdant line of the echoing chamber...

The Other Wife.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... The Other Wife When I married you I did not know I also married death that someday I would watch as you left with her and settled on me the dog the house your body or that so soon she would tire of...

Rubber.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Rubber The day after I had a one-night stand and the condom broke, my car tire went flat on West Main. All these men offered a hand, but none of them could loosen the lug nuts-- a middle-aged one with a cowboy hat, ...

Elegy.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... for Mariya "You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you." --Leviticus 19:28 When you left I stopped everything, or was it that everything stopped? The mail piled up...

A Man's Own House.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... A Man's Own House By the gates of the cemetery, an old shotgun house still stands. A black man has lived here for sixty years, won't sell for cash money or free room and board in the projects. ...

Cotton Mather.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Cotton Mather Even the greatest divine had his doubts. Late at night, he often saw a twisted face in the flames of the winter fireplace. It told him everything was a lie: Bibles, pulpits, and...

Amazing Grace Beauty Salon.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Amazing Grace Beauty Salon Because walk-ins are welcome at the Amazing Grace Beauty Salon, I go out of the August sun, let my unkempt self be wrapped in a purple plastic winding sheet, and am baptized without...

Bloodstone.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Bloodstone I wear a dead man's bloodstone cufflinks. They are the amber of beads of resin bleeding from a gash in a pine and hardened. Set in old fourteen-karat gold, they once belonged to Crepps, my wife's...

Killing the Minotaur.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Killing the Minotaur Why must we keep reliving the old myths? I didn't remember Theseus worming his way through the maze and unwinding the white thread from a gift's spool to return to daylight after killing...

Dirt Angels.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Dirt Angels Because there is no snow in south Georgia at Christmas, my two daughters go out to lie in the red clay and make dirt angels. They beat their arms in the cold dust like the wings of hurt birds trying...

Chicken Fat.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Chicken Fat "Chicken fat!" I hear my mother scream again. "Why is my life such chicken fat?" And though I'm only five years old and stay outside the radius of her coiled right arm, I listen well. Have I...

Mennonites by the Sea.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Mennonites by the Sea Those nearly naked sauntering by, breasts bikinied and buttocks thonged, rolling along beneath white dazzle, before the turquoise sea--vanished their moist, sun-venomed fascination. More than the...

One Night.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... One Night Twenty years, is it, since that summer day we hitchhiked across the state, stuffed our packs in a bus-depot locker, then stumbled stoned out of the concert only to find the depot itself locked tight for the...

Pointoise, 1887.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Pontoise, 1887 She is frightened this year will be his last. Always paint flecks mottle his hair and brows, fill the deep ruts of his skin, stain his clothes. Paint turns his tongue blue. His eyes are a shade of hazel...

Three Troubadour Songs.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... No Marvel If My Song's the Best "Non es meravelha s'eu chan" --Bernart de Ventadorn No marvel if my song's the best Of any sung by troubadour; My heart is drawn to love the more And I more shaped to love's behest. ...

Moon Jelly.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Moon Jelly A vitreous humor, pulsing in the nether, a living study in the vagaries of joy. She is receptiveness made flesh--or very nearly--the shallow bowl of her giving body never filled. What does she care of up or...

Diamond District.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... We Buy, We Sell: the signs flicker an electric interpretation of what it means to live. Below them are the display cases, the ones barred at night and filled with glass replicas, but now shining into the overcast street, ...

Done.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Done Men living in the dark regard of their own faces in the night's black panes pause finally as if for air, and standing there at desks or kitchen drains are so ghosted by those spaces they look...

Deathbed.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... There is a word that is not water, has nothing to do with heat or light, is unrelated to any one pain though the torn body tears itself further trying to speak it. There is a sound beyond all the sounds that I...

The most romantic story ever.(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... WHEN MOLLY, OUR ROMANCE SPECIALIST, first suggested we sponsor a "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" promotion, we figured she'd been into the Grand Marnier again. We worried that such a contest--which asked readers to share their stories of meeting...

Superman.(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... IN 1961, WHEN I WAS SIX, Sinclair Oil and Gas transferred my father from Midland, Texas, to Roswell, New Mexico. Eight months later, his bosses sent him back to Midland. The first move didn't upset me; it was an adventure, a chance to see snow...

City of Roses.(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... FIRST THE FLOODING, THEN THE ROSES. Now this. It was too much--wasn't it? Couldn't it, she wondered, at some point become simply too much? Roberta preferred not dwelling on her own sorrows, especially when greater misery was widespread....

White cloud.(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... FOLLOWING MEHMET ALI to his meeting with the Turkish revolutionaries was a stupid thing to do. He didn't want to be followed, and I wasn't very good at staying out of sight. Istanbul was his city, not mine. But I wasn't trying to be superspy, I...

You are here.(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... GIVEN A CLEAR DAY, Father Tim was hoping to move confession to the Liberty Deck, where penitents could come clean beneath the pure tropical sun. But this Monday, as on the first two days of the Destiny's voyage, the sky is a sallow mess of...

Floating.(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... LARRY HAVARD HAD SPENT almost every free weekend of his life hunting in the woods of his home county in South Mississippi, but for almost a month now, at age thirty-six, he hadn't had the heart to kill one thing. Not after his house caught fire...

Frankenstein: myths of scientific and medical knowledge and stories of human relations.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... FRANKENSTEIN (Frankenstein) is back in the news. It is probably nearer the mark to say that he (it) is nowadays seldom out of it; hardly a week passes without some item in the press either mentioning the name(s) or referring to the theme. Dolly...

Art over easy.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... IN JUNE 2001, BILLY COLLINS was named America's new Poet Laureate, an honorary post most recently held by Stanley Kunitz and occupied in earlier years, when the appointee was more modestly called "Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress,"...