The Southern Review articles from June 1998

The Southern Review archives from June 1998

Walking through St. Patrick's, finding St. Joseph off to the side. (poem)
June 22, 1998... for J. A. A., 1913-1990, who died in his sleep A silent oratory in this cathedral of memory-- till the votive candle sputters, becomes our living room's lamplight barely escaping through the...

The Noah of travelers rest. (poem)
June 22, 1998... You could see his vessel from Highway 25, keel foundering on land cursed With kudzu and God knew what creeping within it. He'd built his defiance fifty feet long in the trough between two waves of mountains,...

"To forget its creator is one of the functions of a creation." (poem)
June 22, 1998... So memory is the absent center: letting things slip out of mind and sight to make discovery possible. And God is no story: which is the why of these strange, awful creatures whose...

Workshop. (poem)
June 22, 1998... from Susan Michener's photographs I could almost cease to believe that beauty has a place in this, our fin-de-siecle unease (what is the "aesthetic?"). Yet her cold pastoral, amniotic work in process, suspense...

Lifetimes. (poem)
June 22, 1998... A day, close to each other's winter solstice: two lives, halfway between pole and equator, ranging the coast's granite edge. Kept feeling the ebb tide starting to turn. Climbed an ice-age boulder; sat,...

Continuation I. (poem)
June 22, 1998... for the mother Lying in restless sleep, your arm broken and then restored by splints and a surgeon's hands, your dreams are fragments too of a life that once seemed whole. Always near the end the music...

Continuation II. (poem)
June 22, 1998... for the father Sometimes in dreams you are restored. You rise from the bed where I saw you last, grope your clothes from a chair, and pull the trousers up as you steady your body with one hand on the wall. In others...

Museum of natural history. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Because they can never change except to dull in color, I still stare as if I were no older either: watching buffalo graze on the plain, their blunt heads unaware of the painted Indians stalking with bows and arrows,...

An elegy for bells. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Do you remember the sound of the old phone ringing? A real bell in it-- the rotary phone on the upright table between your mother's room and yours. It had weight; it had recurrence-- the molecules shifting, the sound...

Clothes in the water. (poem)
June 22, 1998... I turn the water to hot, steaming hot, and say a prayer even though they say you can't catch it this way, after the sun and hot water have hit things. Yet I cower in my bathroom and pray, my fear taking...

Winter afghans. (poem)
June 22, 1998... You'll know when to let go of the afghans piled on top of the winter closet. The mounds of papers and books sliding toward an avalanche of dust. And the skis in the corner that haven't felt the snow ...

In the sunken gardens hotel. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Would you know my skull white as a kabuki mask, free of all the indignities of age? The sun would make its portals gleam, filling in the spaces with your eyes. Would you know me, remember the feel of ...

The dream of the red drink. (poem)
June 22, 1998... This story begins, as they so often do, with heartbreak. I am at a party for a young man whose wife has left him, so he's abandoning graduate school to join the navy. There is a lot of despair at this gathering, the boy's...

Ode to insects. (poem)
June 22, 1998... April arrives on schedule, her foolish sombrero studded with thunderclouds, unfastening her gaudy bolero of green, tender with shoots, spikes of iris cluttering the mud, the new sky hung with giddy fluttering scarves ...

The oboe player. (poem)
June 22, 1998... His lips are full, but to play he must fold them in, make a tight line of those wet curves. It is shocking to see them sprout out again when he finishes playing a long note, takes a breath. The sound he produces is never thin...

This holds water. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Those who have no visitors visit the outside weather permitting them to sit in a row on deck chairs all wearing the same lipstick Lilac Luxury age and an inattentive nurse conspiring to give them matching...

The fourteen happy days of Abd ar-Rahman III. (poem)
June 22, 1998... I have known only fourteen happy days in my life. --last words of Abd ar-Rahman III The first was when he heard her name: Azahara. The second was the time he met her and decided that the caliphate would...

Listening to Faure. (poem)
June 22, 1998... This morning the darkest green, the coldest spring fell away before a sunlit clearing where a cardinal and a jay teased a squirrel they would not attack. Later an overcast sky held until we were inside, and purple irises...

A poem to send to San Francisco. (poem)
June 22, 1998... This year the gladiolus bloomed late, variegated crimson, scarlet, a quick flash of tangerine, weighed down by the season, held by the heat. Calling from the West, you asked weekly were they in flower yet, half afraid, I...

Strip poker. (poem)
June 22, 1998... I'm giving blood and looking at a magazine photo of bosomy Ava Gardner next to that squirt Sinatra and remembering saying, "Want to play strip poker?" to my mom when I was eight because I thought it was a game, not a way...

The sacredness of fingers. (poem)
June 22, 1998... 1. Effel Francis, the oldest Carib matriarch, berates the modern custom of burying our newly deceased at four P.M. sharp no matter what time they died--whether the selfsame day or the day before. Four o'clock, ...

Eden in sepia. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Age has toned their portrait to a haze of dimly alien faces. Whiskers predominate among the men, hooped skirts--columnar-- among the women. And solemn children stare at the brief objective with black immortal pupils...

Homesickness for the fields of peace, the pastures of rest. (poem)
June 22, 1998... On board SS Orizaba out of San Francisco, June 189-- Honolulu twittered beyond the plangent surf, but he was beguiled by a homesickness beyond repair. The rivergrounds at nightfall haunted him, and the poor hills of...

Recidivism. (poem)
June 22, 1998... We lost the knack of kneeling, booted out the elder gods, peopled the heavens with smart dressers, good with guests and not too loud. Still, the old ones lumber back, pockets wadded with thunderjigs, palms black with...

Halyards. (poem)
June 22, 1998... Lifted by a breeze to a blue-water bridge, an old pinging. The aluminum masts rock on boatwaves back and forth in front, of barge homes lashed and tucked at the shore, the boats often larger than the floating ...

Smoke. (poem)
June 22, 1998... With first snow, I think of first fire, the earth wrapped by flame and ash and swept by waves of running darkness. Tonight, no less cruel and voluptuous. The sky's steel edge softened by pearls. Chimney smoke chugs...

Fringe. (short story)
June 22, 1998... I was in a damp corridor Of a restaurant in Manhattan, angry because I'd been coming regularly, feeling I'd found something to call my own, and then they put this news clipping in the window like a flag from someone else's country, to make me...

Malaria. (short story)
June 22, 1998... These are the facts. I know nobody believes in facts any more. But I believe in them. I still think of them as stones--that solid, that capable of causing hurt or heaven. So here they are: Not long ago in the city of La Ceiba on the Caribbean...

Suskind, the impresario. (short story)
June 22, 1998... 1 There were many geniuses at the Museum of the Mind, but Elliot Suskind wasn't one of them. Stuffed away in a cluttered, windowless cubicle at the end of a dusty hall, he spent his days in quarantine, devising publicity events to call...

Vita nuova. (short story)
June 22, 1998... Potrebbe gia l'uomo opporre contra me e dicere che non sapesse a cui fosse lo mio parlare in seconda persona... questo dubbio io lo intendo solvere e dichiarare in questo libello ancora in parte piu dubbiosa....

Beginning. (influence of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
June 22, 1998... I I can't remember when I first read "Prufrock" (as I'll call it for short). It wasn't at school, I'm sure of that. I was born in Tullow, a small town fifty miles southwest of Dublin, but I grew up in Warrenpoint, a town not much...

Born again. (religious beliefs)
June 22, 1998... I was saved in San Bernardino, California, at a suburban Southern Baptist church that neither I nor my father can remember the name of, by a preacher whose name we can't recall, and whose sermon I have forgotten. His words have merged...

Black Zodiac.
June 22, 1998... In the first poem of black zodiac (1997), Charles Wright seems to bid farewell to an idea that has sustained most of his career. He has tried, he says, to "resuscitate" journal and landscape--"Discredited form, discredited subject matter"--to...

An Underachiever's Diary.
June 22, 1998... An Underachiever's Diary by Benjamin Anastas. New York: Dial Press. $15.95 "Do you see any affinity between hard drinking and the writing life? Explain." Well, climb up on my knees here, WD. When you've been staring at this...

Almost No Memory.
June 22, 1998... (cloth). Almost No Memory by Lydia Davis. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. $21.00 "Do you see any affinity between hard drinking and the writing life? Explain." Well, climb up on my knees here, WD. When you've been staring at this...

Bunny Modern.
June 22, 1998... (cloth). Bunny Modern by David Bowman. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $21.95 (cloth). "Do you see any affinity between hard drinking and the writing life? Explain." Well, climb up on my knees here, WD. When you've been staring at this...

Hell.
June 22, 1998... Hell by Kathryn Davis. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. $22.00 (cloth). "Do you see any affinity between hard drinking and the writing life? Explain." Well, climb up on my knees here, WD. When you've been staring at this Billy-by-damn...

Understanding Brooks and Warren. (authors Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren)
June 22, 1998... James A. Grimshaw Jr., ed. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. $39.95 (cloth). Understanding poetry was already a decade old when I came to know it. The revised...

A conversation with Richard Ford. (author)(Interview)
June 22, 1998... Richard Ford is the author of five novels, including The Sportswriter (1986) and its sequel Independence Day (1995). He has also published a well-received book o/stories, Rock Springs (1987), as well as a collection of related novellas, Women...