The Southern Review articles from June 1993

The Southern Review archives from June 1993

'Culture and Anarchy' today.
June 22, 1993... CULTURE AND ANARCHY is one of the chief English books of the nineteenth century. It occupies a prominent place among the canonical Victorian works of cultural criticism--both of the words that go into this characterizing descriptive term being...

Beyond exile: a postcolonial intellectual abroad.
June 22, 1993... It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we...

The dream-career of James Prewitt.
June 22, 1993... BY THE TIME he was seventeen, James Prewitt had launched what he later called his "dream-career as Author." For the rest of his life he was obsessed with the idea of being a writer, in the end recognized as an important writer, or if not in his...

Facing oblivion.
June 22, 1993... But, of course, I don't. Never! I simply won't face it. And yet. Let me distinguish. Nobody loves dreaming more than I, dreams, the free play of the imagination in them, nor, for that matter, sleeping, well! one must sleep in order to...

Alice, Huck, Pinocchio, and the Blue Fairy: bodies real and imagined.
June 22, 1993... The three authors whose book-bodies I am about to violate were born within a decade of one another: the Italian Carlo Lorenzini in 1826, the Englishman Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in 1832, and the American Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. The...

This is the story I told him. (short story)
June 22, 1993... AUGUST, 1966 Off the elevator up the flight of raw wood steps, through a little door in the deckhouse, and out onto the hot, tarry roof went Mr. MacDonald and the three Hardys in single file. All around and below them, they saw the...

The morbidity and mortality weekly report. (short story)
June 22, 1993... The snake man, Marly, and her sick mother: they all showed up the same day, out of the place that people call the blue. The snake man came first. It was my day off, and I was just reading one of the magazines that still come here for Suzie....

Measuring. (short story)
June 22, 1993... The summer my front teeth fell out I set myself to master long-distance spitting. What psychic almanac lays out our seasonal duties? Mine told me that all right-minded children spit through their dental gaps, that never again would target...

1991-1992 (in memoriam D.H.R.). (poem)
June 22, 1993... Speak, grief, and let me know. Yes, I have your latest address, but all I want to know is how long you're staying here. No, I don't want to know where you'll go--just when. 1 A sunny country afternoon: the smell of warm, ripening...

"All that fall." (poem)
June 22, 1993... All that fall wind rattled trees and slipped in keening through cracks in windows or wherever insulation was weak, and even through empty keyholes it whistled in the dark and in daytime whispered ne pas encore, ne pas encore through vacant...

Kore in bloom. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Seeds of the fire cherry live through forest fires. The seedlings come up through ashes, bearing a bloom whose memory begins with this branch. The fertile crescent, the half-moon of the seed in its stone, warms to its tiny sarcophagus, Pompeii...

The Blue Ridge: Heraclitus. (poem)
June 22, 1993... One summer wading the Rapidan, I came across a snakeskin wrapped on an underwater root-- gorged with water, a white snake undulant in current. Years it hung there, beckoning to emerge into meaning, swung between the ardor of its own fact, the...

Invitation to a wedding. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Cold light locks in the season, blades of ice on burnished grass. We are talking about a day to come in the blaze of August. Plans set in motion, we turn to wording our invitation, feeling the press of letters we hope to match with our own lives....

A New Year's trek. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Holy peak no one may climb, immaculate, immense, whose every ice-cliff, sheer rock face, and snow-hung ridge sharp-edged against the blue converges on a point that trails a spin drift wisp of cloud or snow: Machapuchare was with us that first...

Mayflies. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Every day for a week we watch them, appearing, as if out of nowhere, on the lake's surface, each one having risen as a nymph from the bottom and hatched into a creature lovely enough to make us stop rowing for a moment, our raised oars dripping...

Weather. (poem)
June 22, 1993... My grandmother's on the phone announcing the feel of snow in her bones. Her county's still a small world, cable less and dry, its people antique, every quilting and haircut a ruse to talk health and conduct the ritual seance of youth. My bones...

The chronic liar buys a canary. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I I he name on her brown uniform said Jeanette. She placed the bird gently in his palm, its sharp feet digging into his skin, a pebble-sized heart fluttering. She explained the canary's eating habits while he concentrated on her gray eyes...

Revelation. (poem)
June 22, 1993... The first songbird my stepmother Killed, a golden-voiced canary, Caught pneumonia when she forgot To move its cage away from the Drafty window and cover it for The night. Hearing its wheezing, Arias riddled with railles, she Smothered the bird...

Nocturne. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Pittsburgh winter, iron and old snow, Buildings quarried from granite And gray, nineteenth-century stone Fading in the dusk and mill smoke, A few cars emptying from the lots, Their parking lights burning. It must Be Saturday, since I am in...

The shape of the goddess in Homestead Park. (poem)
June 22, 1993... The first breast I even touched by accident, Though I ached to lay such shining on my desire, Was the left breast of Jimmy Markowitz's younger sister. One half of the other part of the tussle Beneath the backboard, she was only another Heft and...

The rose bus. (poem)
June 22, 1993... The day before Valentine's it appeared, parked facing the highway in a hard scrabble field even weeds struggle to take hold in among dumped and windblown trash and a caved-in billboard for some motel that isn't eight miles ahead anymore. Thirty...

Art of the Middle Ages. (poem)
June 22, 1993... The faces of angels and cherubs don't move, hovering as they do above it all, their smooth, sweet features radiant and vacant, their bodies lost in clouds. I see no comfort waiting in their wings, no home behind their liquid eyes. The faces that...

The descent. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Sucked hollow, I lie here with your lips wrapped around my bones. O Mother, O woman, from the very first you knew making me wear short pants was the thing to do, that when I grew up, no First Sergeant or corporate CEO could give me the sword...

Night snow. (poem)
June 22, 1993... The snow fell till midnight then stopped as quietly as it had begun. The fields lay stretched out in the moonlight where it all began and ended as before, while this speck that I am watched in awe the falling of one last flake past my breath on...

Roue. (poem)
June 22, 1993... The odds and ends they left behind to captivate his lecher's mind (the intermingled locks of hair, the articles of underwear, the postcards from another coast), he long ago misplaced or lost. But vestiges of rose perfume still linger all about...

Maugherow. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I remember a cold wind giving querulous tongues to the circling stands of trees that morning in Maugherow, the sweep of your brown hair across a white pillow, the outline of your breasts in the gray bedclothes. I remember, out our window, Queen...

Doorish. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I A run-down Georgian house, the remnants of a barn, a few hectares of grazing land-- it took a Connachtman to give this place a name, some farmer, kin of mine, who worked these rocky fields two hundred years ago and more, who knew the...

A sighting on the river. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I That summer morning years ago we watched a red-tailed hawk descending from the pines across the stony riverbed. O River, wind us now in night. His talons clutching writhing prey, his plumage spread against a shaft of swirling air, we...

The Jo-Al Beauty Shoppe. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Nona, blond and whiskey-voiced, was the one My mother turned to the summer my dad Told Mom he felt like she was his mother, He couldn't stay--I remember the shock Of Mom's hair in a sack, The frizzy halo that Nona called A poodle cut, the way...

Crawlspace. (poem)
June 22, 1993... In coastal Florida where my mother lives the old are everywhere but some feel younger by the minute. Terrific! Never better! my mother's diabetic neighbor shouts from her tipsy lawn tractor. I'm like a kid down here! Everyday vicissitude however...

Spaghetti. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I had not remembered, but do now. I am near the place: the tracks remind me and the Amtrak horn that precedes the escaping windows filled with no silhouettes. It was my last Carolina summer (lack of money would drive me north) that I heard the...

Sponges. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I bought two sponges from a woman in Tarpon Springs. A friend had rented a car to drive me there through banyan and orange grove, the waxy frangipani bawdy as whores, through the wild, throaty lushness of hibiscus, to the graying dock where...

Territorial. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Squirrels in the attic! Chimney swifts! And in every eave and gutter another non-paying tenant. So each spring I emerge, bleached animal out of its century, to reclaim what I thought was mine--the whole house wrapped in angel hair, small viaducts...

Groceries. (poem)
June 22, 1993... I had a boyfriend once, after my mother and brothers and sisters and I fled my father's house, who worked at the Piggly Wiggly where he stocked shelves on Fridays until midnight then drove to my house to sneak me out, take me down to the tracks...

The scar. (poem)
June 22, 1993... The first time I saw his naked body rising above me from the couch where all day I had memorized for my art history final the rudiments of line and medium and hue I thought Michelangelo's David had stepped out of its binding, the papery thighs...

The potato mash (more indefinite and more soluble). (poem)
June 22, 1993... If Debussy had written the score to the story of my adolescence, he would have called it, after the name of the poem by his good friend Mallarme, L'Apres-Midi d'un Dope. So many adventures! All of them stupid. For a while I worked for a rock...

What might be called burning. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Six crows forecast the weather in April, the ground frozen. Snow will arrive after the crows empty their raucous lungs of what sounds like regret. Crows are territorial, but the snow is still only a thought of snow, hinted at by clouds as though...

A world beneath. (poem)
June 22, 1993... ". . . pictures of a summer's afternoon." --Virginia Woolf 1. We set about the task, dragged the mattock, the posthole digger from the shed and divined the right spot beneath the oak. I swung the pick six or seven times, and the tool...

The mystery. (poem)
June 22, 1993... ". . . how great is the mystery that looks out of the eyes of a dog. . . ." --Margaret Washburn, The Animal Mind Grown as old in her own years now as anyone in town, Cleopatra, deaf and blind, lies quietly all day on the cool front...

The wing as lever/air as fulcrum. (poem)
June 22, 1993... "Thin ice will often bear a skater who moves rapidly over it. . . ." --F. W. Headley, The Structure and Life of Birds, 1895 Don't stop to ask how it works. It works. If you pause to consider the wing as lever--and how the fixed...

The sound of my father. (poem)
June 22, 1993... He died all at once and dies bit by bit. Now it is his voice I have lost: I can no longer remember the sound of my father. Now that, finally, I listen for it, he mouths the few words of his I remember, smiles mute from the old photos. All I have...

All the angels are dying. (poem)
June 22, 1993... Human, they leave us in the brightest spring, or on the hinge of a dry season, gone as late November leaves, fallen wings wafting ground ward. The caesura song of their departure discords the world. Do they think of what their deprivation leaves?...

Jazz.
June 22, 1993... WHEN A WRITER has a mind as extraordinary, an imagination as creative, and an ear as attentive as that of Toni Morrison, something wonderful is bound to happen. We have only to think of Morrison's first five novels--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song...

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
June 22, 1993... WHEN A WRITER has a mind as extraordinary, an imagination as creative, and an ear as attentive as that of Toni Morrison, something wonderful is bound to happen. We have only to think of Morrison's first five novels--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song...

The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938.
June 22, 1993... Edited by Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. $35.00 (cloth). READING THIS WONDERFUL and wonderfully produced book (it is what Norman Jeffares does best), it is easy to imagine that Maud...

Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America's Classic Children's Books.
June 22, 1993... By Jerry Griswold. New York: Oxford University Press. $25.00 (cloth). CHILDREN'S BOOKS as Jerry Griswold recognizes, are a hot subject for publishers and scholars alike. But these are also books that touch us as young readers in ways that...