The Southern Review articles from March 1994

The Southern Review archives from March 1994

Ohio. (short story)
March 22, 1994... It was still dark when Stuart carried his suitcase out to the car. The streetlights glowed in single file up and down the block, and it seemed to him that their slender necks were bending beneath the weight of each bulb. He breathed deeply, and...

The dead. (short story)
March 22, 1994... In August of 1791, a large number of the black slaves of the French colony of Sainte Domingue met at the LeNormand Plantation, on the borders of the forest called Bois Cayman, to organize a revolt against their white masters. The slave...

Down the Green River. (short story)
March 22, 1994... WERE FINE. We were holding onto a fine day on the fine Green River in the mountains of Utah five hours from Salt Lake with the sun out and Toby already fishing when his mother Glenna said, "We're sinking." She had been a pain in the ass since...

Drummer down. (short story)
March 22, 1994... He had never liked the young dancing Astaire, all greedy and certain. But now he was watching an old ghost thriller, and he liked Astaire old, pasted against the wall of mortality - dry, scared, maybe faintly alcoholic. This was a man. He...

Distressed passenger. (short story)
March 22, 1994... Getting ready for company, I gathered my hair into a loose braid. I was too old for so much hair, but I couldn't bear to cut it. The plait was a compromise. I felt festive, blessed because of the evening ahead. I'd put on a long gored skirt...

War story. (short story)
March 22, 1994... THIS WAS THE STORY he gave his wife once he'd married after the war, and the story he gave his children, the story he gave his children's children. It was no hero's story, he knew, but only a story of what he'd done, how he'd served with...

Work. (poem)
March 22, 1994... I'm dreaming of that work, Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room, and while I sleep a virus sweeps the earth, and when I wake I see the population of the world is me. I take the observation suite in Emley Moor Mast to watch the...

Bastards. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Those bastards in their mansion; to hear them shriek, you'd think I'd poisoned the dogs and vaulted the ditches, crossed the lawns in stocking feet and threadbare britches, forced the door of one of the porches, and lifted the gift of fire...

Swine. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Brung up with swine, I was, and dogs, and raised on a diet of slime and slops and pobs, then fell in one day with a different kind. Some say that gives me the right to try out that line about having a bark and having a bite, and a nose for...

Convictions. (poem)
March 22, 1994... No convictions - that's my one major fault. Nothing to tempt me to scream and shout, nothing to raise Cain or make a song and dance about. A man like me could be a real handful, steeping himself overnight in petrol, becoming inflamed on...

Baby. (poem)
March 22, 1994... I think about the time we find we hold the loose end of the family line. The milk and the post arrive with a baby. The arm of the chair is nursing a cushion, a baby. The windows are daubed with the sign of a baby. Outside, a dog runs off...

Jean Rhys: World's End. (poem)
March 22, 1994... At age twenty, my first love affair ended. I wanted to drink myself to death. My girlfriend suggested a move: Chelsea, a neighborhood called World's End. A stationer's shop the window, quill pens: red, blue, green, yellow. I bought a...

Jean Rhys: England, 16. (poem)
March 22, 1994... This wasn't England, this was never England. The trains should have been red and blue like the toy ones in Dominica. I hadn't heard of tunnels. After the first one I asked, "Was that a train accident?" Like always, I should have expected...

Jean Rhys: Lancelot. (poem)
March 22, 1994... The name - like my whole life implausible but true My first. The best was when he held me, breathless, saying "Little dear, little love." I knew he was incapable of going away, and I was lost: Anything, any way you want." No past, no...

The pet store. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Standing outside late from school I leaned to the cage of birds, the bars shining in the sunlight and the green-and-yellow bodies flitting perch to perch, with no sound coming through the glass. Could they see me? I stubbed my finger on the...

The Carmelite nun. (poem)
March 22, 1994... The convent in Via Marcantonio Colonna was built in 1930. My aunt, who once worked in the family firm, joined the Carmelites after the War. In 1946 she went inside. She's been permitted out three times to vote (on divorce, abortion, and...

Air and water: John Muir. (poem)
March 22, 1994... The Bible beaten into him (thrashed excessively, but exclusively on weekdays, to preserve the calm of the Sabbath), Muir one of three children (the others left with their mother in Dunbar) taken to settle in the Wisconsin prairie. First at...

The blue house. (poem)
March 22, 1994... On a rectilinear acreage laid waste during the race riots of the '60s have mushroomed these transplant clinics and others: founts of the greenback. From my hotel bedroom I drop ten floors to a menu of fries. In the foyer hushed relatives,...

The American girl. (poem)
March 22, 1994... I recall the low ceilings; velour curtains, oppressively drawn; silver cups turned into lamps; and on the parlor wall, a framed print I assumed was my great-uncle, before he was lamed: whip held high, hands firm on the reins; the mare's...

Photograph, not of me or Little Billie, circa 1953. (poem)
March 22, 1994... My mother stands with her bowling team, she and three neighbor ladies all in dresses, nothing fancy, unless it's her buttons, black and shaped like pansies, later my favorite in the button jar. If you look at me, then back at the four young...

Beauty in all things. (poem)
March 22, 1994... During drought, wind in the cornstalks makes the sound of rain. It is comforting to sit there, and startling to come upon a wild delphinium in the aspen grove, a shock of blue that is almost pain. My niece didn't understand the laughter that...

The day after Easter. (poem)
March 22, 1994... The rooster crows the day after Easter, too, though you've already guessed: we are past every betrayal, past our years of Peter and Judas. We just stand here in the April garden among the peach trees that are to march into heaven and with...

Fog area. (poem)
March 22, 1994... flings a blanket over your windscreen on Interstate 91 and whispers in the air around your vehicle, "Now find your way." Fog area's hills, rivers, forests, and natural life are wild guesses you make with visibility down to sweet F.A. ...

The voice. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Just before he woke a voice said, "You've been a coward in matters of the heart." He knew he'd been speaking to himself, and all day he felt indicted, caught. He went around the house gluing, banging, rearranging. Work and the motion of work -...

Road stop. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Not all laundromats are sad. Back in the Village, the one I frequented was a place to read and watch what women turn on the delicate cycle for. I was younger then and wanted to live in a city and count myself among the fashionably poor. Now...

Imagining myself my father. (poem)
March 22, 1994... I drove slowly, the windows open, letting the emptiness within meet the brotherly emptiness without. Deer grazed by the Parkway's edge, solemnly enjoying their ridiculous, gentle lives. There were early signs of serious fog. Salesman with...

Buds. (poem)
March 22, 1994... From late November until the solstice - what used to seem the lowest notch before the sky-ratchet nudged forward - I have begun to notice, on vines and shrubs and trees I'd thought were dead, half-hidden below those few stiff, discolored leaves...

Held water. (poem)
March 22, 1994... I have discovered I cannot bear to be with people anymore. Even the querulous love of old friends defeats me and I turn away, my face staring at the hard sleet scraping at what little is left of the trees in early spring. The bellied pods of...

The deer. (poem)
March 22, 1994... There was the deer he saw deep in the snake-grass meadows, a place where he was still young, a doe in the waist-high grass, her face eaten, and the flies. That she was blind, the bone showing blue above her jaw. What he remembers after going to...

The calf. (poem)
March 22, 1994... In the orchard they had tied the calf between two trees and, because they wanted to please, knowing he was from the town and knew about books and songs, they offered her to him first. He didn't understand and refused, standing there awkward in...

Solipsism. (poem)
March 22, 1994... I spend days at the gym enclosed by four mirrors, a silver pole balanced upon my shoulders. I slide keys out of the machines, slot them lower to lift my weights with increased strain, to pump the last reps in my personal program. I watch...

Elegy with a thimbleful of water in the cage. (poem)
March 22, 1994... It's a list of what I cannot touch: Some dandelions & black-eyed Susans growing back, like innocence Itself, with its thoughtless style, Over an abandoned labor camp south of Piedra; And the oldest trees, in that part of Paris with...

By the light of one star. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Stooped, we enter the cave of the petroglyphs. Reddish, a dried-blood color, the swirls of paint are derived from volcanic ash, which bonds its glaze to coral cave walls for a near-permanent fix. No one has yet decoded some of these portraits,...

The spiritualization of cruelty. (poem)
March 22, 1994... The night it snowed a man set fire to his dog near the road. Chained him to a stake by a pile of burning timber, a blind dog who would not have believed such brightness possible. The villagers came to watch, to warm themselves at the...

Effort of love. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Coincidence, you say, if traced back far enough, becomes inevitable. In the Zen Restaurant you ask for the menu though a sign tells us there is nothing to eat, there is nothing to drink, there is only history. I take this as inevitable until...

Water. (poem)
March 22, 1994... The miracle of water is that it tastes of nothing, neither of chlorine nor peat, not of old tap fittings or dead sheep. Water was the first mirror, drinking images of young beauty, showing their wrinkled future in a breeze. Water takes...

Ji.m. (poem)
March 22, 1994... My poems were cloudy pints to you, pasty pasties from the local shop. "At least Pam Ayres can rhyme," you'd say; you liked to try to wind me up. I remembered, Jim, one of your jokes as I stood at your grave, earth in my hand. Only you...

The clearing. (poem)
March 22, 1994... I had come to Australia for ten weeks, as a guest of the state. My duties were light: to confer with students. They didn't want to - they came once or twice, that was all. One night someone knocked: a student with some poems she'd like me...

Al and Beth. (poem)
March 22, 1994... My Uncle Al worked in a drugstore three blocks above Times Square, dispensing pills and cosmetics. All day long crazy people and thieves came into the store, but nothing seemed to faze him. His sister, Beth, was the opposite... romantic....

The house. (poem)
March 22, 1994... The house had a dozen bedrooms, each of them cold, and the wind battered the windows and blew down powerlines to leave the house dark. Rats lived in the foundations, sending scouts under the stairs for a year or two, and once a friendly ghost...

Keep him in. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Keep him back, don't let him out. Lock the door, keep him in overnight, make him cover the greenboard in writing so small he'll need a magnifying glass or a telescope to help him read it back to us. Leave him different colored chalks. ...

Boeing. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Boeing In October 1992 a Boeing jet carrying four passengers and a cargo of perfume crashed into an apartment complex in Amsterdam, killing many. The 1000 [degrees] Centigrade heat evaporated the victims. Evaporated as if lives...

Injunction. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Injunction I no longer look like her, though the voice I recognized, even then, as from a distant calling. My aunt sat crying, her shoulders slumped forward, shaking - softly, then not softly. Two sobs and two more. Her door was ajar...

Understairs. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Understairs This is where you would hide from your own mother as she screamed and ranted till they came to take her - cobwebs across faces, gas pipes, the inscrutable pointers, the old mop with its gray head leaning. Rags still hang...

Stuffing hearts. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Stuffing Hearts The day we quarreled, I helped my mother stuff hearts; I showed her how to snip out the trunks of gristle, follow the burrowing branches in search of unsuspected cavities molded to her blind fingers, and fill them, to...

Endhome. (poem)
March 22, 1994... Endhome You want to kill yourself but you have no place to do it. You can't mess up the home: unfair to wife and kids. You wish the government would fund Endhome, a common place for those who need a legal way to die. There're abortion...

The sound of it. (poetry)
March 22, 1994... This first, which might doom everything: poetry is the closest literary form we have to silence. I think about prose too sometimes. What I think is - prose is made almost completely of words. And poetry is not. I keep coming back to this notion...

Flaubert, love, and photography. (Gustave Flaubert)
March 22, 1994... In a surprising and previously unpublished quarter-plate daguerreotype, a young and still handsome Gustave Flaubert at about the age of twenty-five sits in his study, clearly affecting the pose of "the writer." Inscribed on the reverse in what...

Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. (poem)
March 22, 1994... What the hell was the matter with him?... I mean he hadn't much to complain about. He was tall." "You know what a boa constrictor does if it has something to eat that's unpalatable? It sort of covers it with the boa constrictor equivalent...

The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden.
March 22, 1994... Anthony hecht has written a voluminous book on the poetry of W. H. Auden. He is the first American poet of his caliber to have done so, and few of the major voices who found their distinctive registers during Auden's lifetime have so obviously...

The Collected Stories.
March 22, 1994... I HAVE BECOME CERTAIN of one thing in the last half-year: the rich collection of stories in The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price - the galley copy of which I have absolutely torn apart, used up, wrecked - will exist somewhere as a thread in...

Particles and Luck.
March 22, 1994... AT THE OUTSET of Particles and Luck, Louis B. Jones's smart and stylish second novel, Mark Perdue has it all: he is newly married and, at twenty-seven, the occupant of an endowed chair in physics at Berkeley as well as the new owner of a deluxe...

Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery.
March 22, 1994... AT THE OUTSET of Particles and Luck, Louis B. Jones's smart and stylish second novel, Mark Perdue has it all: he is newly married and, at twenty-seven, the occupant of an endowed chair in physics at Berkeley as well as the new owner of a deluxe...

The Virgin Suicides.
March 22, 1994... AT THE OUTSET of Particles and Luck, Louis B. Jones's smart and stylish second novel, Mark Perdue has it all: he is newly married and, at twenty-seven, the occupant of an endowed chair in physics at Berkeley as well as the new owner of a deluxe...

Bloodsong.
March 22, 1994... AT THE OUTSET of Particles and Luck, Louis B. Jones's smart and stylish second novel, Mark Perdue has it all: he is newly married and, at twenty-seven, the occupant of an endowed chair in physics at Berkeley as well as the new owner of a deluxe...

Dogs of God.
March 22, 1994... AT THE OUTSET of Particles and Luck, Louis B. Jones's smart and stylish second novel, Mark Perdue has it all: he is newly married and, at twenty-seven, the occupant of an endowed chair in physics at Berkeley as well as the new owner of a deluxe...

The Frighteners.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Electroplating the Baby.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Zoom.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Tale of the Mayor's Son.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Explaining Magnetism.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

The Bradford Count.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

The Tutankhamun Variations.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Body Politic.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Red.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

English Earthquake.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Rebel Without Applause.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

City Psalms.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Flowering Limbs.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

Kissing the Night.
March 22, 1994... It is harder than ever to generalize about British poetry, just as it is about American poetry. The term itself suggests some unifying characteristic in the poetry written by the Welsh, the Scottish, the Northern Irish, and especially (and...

The New Poetry.
March 22, 1994... American readers will be interested and perhaps surprised by the variety and range of poets represented in the newest Bloodaxe poetry anthology, edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy, and David Morley. Like Neil Astley's 1988 sampler of...