The Southern Review articles from March 2001

The Southern Review archives from March 2001

Possessions in The Great Gatsby.
March 22, 2001... I. The Envelope of Circumstances TWO HUNDRED PAGES INTO The Portrait of a Lady, Madame Merle carries on an instructive conversation with Isabel Archer about marriage prospects. Madame Merle, very much a woman of the world, feels sure that...

Being Boss: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.
March 22, 2001... LIKE DASHIELL HAMMLETT, RAYMOND CHANDLER turned to writing detective fiction to support himself when his previous work as a salaried employee of a business ran out. Hammett had joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency as an operative in 1915 at...

Dante.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... If you imagine that others are there, you are there yourself. WENDELL BERRY's newest books are Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, and a novel, Jayber Crow, both published last year by Counterpoint Press....

Cathedral.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Stone of the earth made of its own weight light WENDELL BERRY's newest books are Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, and a novel, Jayber Crow, both published last year by Counterpoint Press.

Sights.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The tourists, having come from afar, Are taking pictures of each other Taking pictures of each other. WENDELL BERRY's newest books are Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, and a novel, Jayber Crow, both...

Come On.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... "Come on, baby," says the sparrow's wife, fluttering her wings. "One more time." He does it one more time twelve or thirteen times. How much weed seed do you have to eat to do that? WENDELL BERRY's newest...

A Position.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I'm philosophically opposed to iced drinks: Last should equal first, for a man who thinks. WENDELL BERRY's newest books are Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, and a novel, Jayber Crow, both published last...

The Leader.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Head like a big watermelon, frequently thumped and still not ripe. WENDELL BERRY's newest books are Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, and a novel, Jayber Crow, both published last year by...

Supplication.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... O may our minds not altogether wither From sciences of anything whatever, The economy, the future, or the weather. WENDELL BERRY's newest books are Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, and a novel, Jayber...

A Smoke is Better Than a Smudge.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Sex, it appears, has just about run its course. The rich, the famous, and the powerful have overdone it, as they finally overdo everything. What could be tackier? Liberation, having achieved among the...

Jayber Crow's Silly Song about Jesus.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I. What make of car will Jesus drive When He comes back again? What new model will He contrive To save the world from sin? Soon may He come again to earth To set us free at last, For Satan's car has no...

In the Big House of the Allman Brothers My Heart Gets Tuned.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... for Kirk and Kirsten West Visitors sleeping in strange rooms may themselves be visited, surprised by a gauzy and uninvited guest, a curious gray eye peering over a dusty chiffonier. Visitors sleeping, yes, or...

One Weekend Home.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... You, sir, are a lying sack of shit, says a pretty girl to a man at the pool table, and he misses his shot. She gets up and kisses him full on the lips. I've been painting my mother's house all day. I've...

Body Modifications.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... "To be born woman is to know-- Although they do not talk o[ it at school-- That we must labour to be beautiful." --William Butler Yeats, "Adam's Curse" Butterfly parts her long wings Skull and crossbones A...

Grappling.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... New River, Snead's Ferry, NC, circa 1950 The sergeant sets the throttle: troll. You're marines. You'll take turns with the hooks. If we hook him and he surfaces, don't look at the colonel's eyes, unless you want...

Burial Dream.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... All through the yard the dried weeds grew waist-high, speckled with aphids, locusts, and huge fleas. I should've cut and sprayed a month ago. I thought I heard the power mower whine. When I peeked around the corner of the...

Descent.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Shellacked in place below a dented skull two femurs move a little as though cramped in the cut-down wooden case my uncle holds. Beneath a sheet of plastic clear as glass glossed yellow bones are spotting Lincoln green. ...

Don't Start.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Over the phone, through which we struggled so clumsily all those many years ago, I try now to describe the process of loading the camera. But I don't have the vocabulary to convey the steps, which aren't difficult, just...

Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The bullfinch poses in mid-flight, like the Holy Ghost, above the picnickers. In a pool in the middle distance a woman wearing a shift seems, I repeat seems, to be douching herself. The other woman, naked, seated on...

The Curvature of the Earth.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... In Red Square the curvature of the earth is more extreme than anywhere else, recalled Mandelstam in exile in Voronezh. By the time the earth reached Voronezh it was nearly vertical so that the poet and his birdlike wife...

The Gross Clinic.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... One who loves earth and the sun and animals stands over the necrotic thigh of a wolfhound with scalpel and rongeur, a patina of antiseptic reddening the bare skin around the wound. The odors are a mixture of rotted...

Hydrangeas.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... for Dick After the woman was gone, I was alone. The anemone appeared as always above the moist dirt; dust and pollen lay like sheets over tables and lampshades. Desire came and went, explaining nothing....

The False Spring.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... "What is important to you?" she said. "What is really important?" The February sun, between snows, was doing its best, slanting onto the fields, a better day than yesterday for all of them. The mice and voles, rabbits...

La Maja Desnuda.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Francisco Goya, The Naked Maja, c. 1800. The painting led the Inquisition in 1815 to summon Goya before the tribunal to identify it and declare whether it was by his hand. In 1930, to commemorate the hundredth ...

Boxing.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Couldn't afford not to, my friends insisting: with my long reach I should jab well enough to unbalance and uppercut any son-of-a-bitch. Nested deep in memory, the setup, first day of drill, and fat Vern,...

Drummer Young.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Baltimore, forty years ago-- West Fayette, a corner bar and my quintet: piano, tenor, trumpet, bass, drums. I parked down the street, beside a churchyard, an iron fence, a tipped stone, and Poe's grave. Every...

The Photograph.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The ocean was silver farther off. The waves, uniform. No one walked along the sand. And the distance was unspoiled by the shapes of masts and the shapes of human forms in the surf. I went there to see the emptiness: the...

Beachfront.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I stood on the balcony. The surf was split, here and there, black and white. I looked to the island roofs, flashing like bronze windows in the sun. The gulls were angled--I had to use my hand to see the miniature first...

Sheets.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The laundry hangs, white in the black evening. Someone should tell me to bring it in, from between the gray poles. And deal with the outside and inside subjects. The birds have finished digging in the grass, tended and...

Muscle.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The sun was blank, like a chamber. Near the graveyard stones, children played. Their voices as if on glass. I was alone again with the wristwatch tick of the leaves. The sun was in my nerve. I heard a starling. I...

Epistle to the Field in Eldred, Pennsylvania.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I must tell you now what I didn't need to say before, our flesh so close we met in the blackberry blood on my tongue, in the burning brand of sun on my back, in the shadows of high roiling clouds nomadic, your body...

An Epistle to Robinson Jeffers.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Sick at heart, I want poor bitch Cassandra, your hawk-faced girl, to mutter in my stead truth to power. Close on the cusp of the new century, Jeffers, the public cant appalls--but we will test our warheads, eat poisoned...

On the Threshold.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... for Betty Adcock That summer before I came west was a summer of screen doors. I lived out beyond the air conditioners, among the alfalfa. The river there in the distance mattered most because you could watch it...

On a Panel of Adam Naming the Animals.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I. One must remember: All around was Wonder. And each entity caught that glint and glowed Under the particularity of its nature. Him-- Seated beneath the noble oak in glorious leaf Full aloft--pronouncing each syllable...

On a Miniature from the Sacred Arch.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... (Portrait of Adam in the Garden) Rough tree, my Adam, your knotted, slender body Is my Garden--you, whose first, curved flank Energy brought to Being--you, with your lean Trunk of middle and firm-mapped Backside, ...

On the Night of the Second Day.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Warmth, for some weeks, had prepared the branches, so deep In their rough matrix life sparked--expanded. Their lengths now scored by that fragile winged Green that fills warm nights with its low flying-- In the dark...

On the Endurance of the Flesh of the World.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Miraculously, weather continued its patterns--daylight Entered each window on its vast, singular Mission; clouds rose majestic on the distant Horizon, carrying with them libations for The far-flung provinces. Not all...

In the Well.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... My father cinched the rope, a noose around my waist, and lowered me into the darkness. I could taste my fear. It tasted first of dark, then earth, then rot. I swung and struck my head and at that moment...

Cattails.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... A stand of cattails, brown heads erupting seed, silk tufts unfolding from coarse velvet. I stopped and studied them while all my friends walked on except for one who lingered, agitated, and watched me...

Southern Literature.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... She hunched in the backseat and smoked one Lucky Strike off the one before. She talked about her good friend Bill. No one wrote like Bill anymore. When my silence grew uncomfortable, she'd hand me my six dollars,...

Coins and Ashes.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... We need two hundred bucks! Mom screamed, and swept the table clear of coins I'd stacked in dollar piles. Flesh burning in the air. We what? Dad yelled. Two hundred bucks? The coins rolled toward the shadows, ...

Codas.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... "What you see is what you get." Such codas we learned from exotic sources, say the carnival barker lining his olive-skinned girls onstage outside the tent, their little hoochie-coochie twists and bumps luring us in to...

Sunlight, darling,.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... makes a toy of night, whose monstrous wedding submerges once again beneath the tarp and all the warping promises that lust commenced and trysting ended (defended, if at all, by Freud's displacements ...

Junked Boiler.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... For weeks it was his depression detour, this futuristic box on legs, two smokestack pipe fittings fixed on top and glass cylinder gauge still kelvinating, still in place, a junked machine retrieved from some alleyway,...

To a Fallen Walnut Tree.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... In the Columbia Tribune a mere paragraph that this August storm took off a roof and blew a doghouse through a chain-link fence, the Weimaraner inside intact, though skittish now, it seems, at back-porch chimes (the owners...

Ouro Preto, Bishop-Neruda.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... "I wrote her a little poem in English. It had a few errors, which is only as it should be." The article itself scrawled in small, poor script on a postcard--on a teeming jungle-summer noon: when Pablo Neruda comes to...

Triolets for Triolet.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Triolet: a French verse form. Also the name of a Creole village in Mauritius, firebombed during racial unrest in 1999. I. Walk through the winding streets of Triolet, its two-room cement houses. Those tin roofs seem one...

Hearing Cars.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Cars were noise when I was young. I'd recognize my father's on its final mile: He is returning late from work, report sheets waiting to be completed. Plug in the lime-plated copper kettle. Heat his dinner in the iron...

Love Life.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... You really have to hand it to them. They let nothing stand between them and love's work; even in the face of inequality and AIDS, admit no impediment that would detract from glossy theories of attraction (Put your...

A Bad Jew.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I'm a bad Jew, I spent the new year not in shul but gossiping deliciously at a party, a surprise party, deceit and aggression, drinking and despising a guest's long-winded stories, mine were better, I was the...

Snowflakes in Hell.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... We would all melt from the heat of our sins like snowflakes in hell, Sister Ann Zita hissed that darkening upstate New York November afternoon as we traced and cut flakes from the heavy white construction ...

Dream-Eaze.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I don't even hear the geese honking as they dive-bomb the pond on March 5 A.M.'s, and I don't hear our son's alarm, the clump of his boots down the creaking stairs, nor the telephone ringing in the...

Mockingbird.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... They're all gone, the two goldfinches, bluejay, twenty or more crows, the mockingbird that kept me company through the summer while I cut dead trees and burned brush, hearing him by the barn, the chicken coop, the...

Onlookers with the Burned Body of Jesse Washington, Eighteen-Year-Old African-American, Waco, Texas, 1916.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... His mother at the edge of the crowd, blind with the impossible, standing mute, agog, gone. And yet the smell of the smoke of her son's body fills the air around her this May afternoon in Texas. The sun glitters ...

To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... But let us be friends awhile and understand our differences are small and that they float like dust in sunny rooms, and let us settle into the good work of being strangers simply who have something to say in the middle of the...

Florence's Horse.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... for my mother The house where she grew up is demolished. A new family lives where she raised hers. Long dead, the horse she climbed a tree to reach and ride no longer runs, and the tree might yet or might not stand in...

Coursing.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, Galway Again, the Spanish Arch, then Lynch's window of the pitiful son, until a chill rain pelts me to the church with an inner door whose limestone arch is carved...

On the Maury.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Between riverside sycamores near Fox Rock where the red vixen fished last year, brown trout feed cagily as my caddis shimmers above the riffle, and the current is riven by stones from the old bridge to spill...

The Unknowns.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Like the old math, the new math is wildly incomprehensible to me. If only they had told me that it was all metaphor, I might have learned, I might not have troubled so long tonight over...

Folk Tale.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... 1957: you remember the fins, don't you, on the baby-blue-and-white Bel Air? Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts, beyond the many-colored rabbits penned for the evening by the tap tap of the...

After Horace I,V.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I wonder what skinny, sweet-smelling boy holds you, tangled in the roses of your unreal garden. Although you tie your blond hair back with such lovely, practiced grace, he will grieve at your moods to come; in...

Unshod Place for Saints.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Saints on wallpaper, in carts and minivans, saints on carpets, in intervals, crawlspaces teeming with saints, a tidy sum of them massing on the flagpoles. I once saw a saint sink into a hammock and another sit on a hassock...

Her Handwriting.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... High standard cursive, careful, no inappropriate wavering. Scale, measure, formal requirements, and intimations. Each word has a soul, and this ink is that famous temple in which the soul endures--no, swells out...

The Weight.(Short Story)
March 22, 2001... THIS IS A STORY I would have told grandchildren--and great-grandchildren--if I'd had any. I had three wives, but no children. That's a mystery, I suppose. As it's a mystery that I've been around for more than a century and am still blessed with...

The Bear Hunters.(Short Story)
March 22, 2001... THE BOY WAS STUDYING the rivers of Europe on the computer. He traced the path of the Danube and watched its seven mouths empty into the Black Sea, or Pontus Euxinus, a name the Romans used long before Jesus was born. It was the end of...

Charting the Territories of the Red.(Short Story)
March 22, 2001... WHEN THE WOMEN CAME BACK from the rest area, slinging their purses along and giggling, Dennis guessed that someone had flirted with them. He hoped they'd keep their mouths shut about it. He was almost certain that Sandy wouldn't say a word, but...

Tennessee.(Short Story)
March 22, 2001... Far down the aisles of the forest the enchantment held its wonderful sway, and she felt in her own ignorant fashion how beautiful is the accustomed light. When the horse's stumbling feet had ceased to sound among the stones, the wilderness...

The Collective Unconscious.(Review)
March 22, 2001... THE SAMPLING OF VOICES and poetic values in the five collections gathered here may serve to illustrate the scope, depth, and dimension of current American poetry, which seems to me based on a kind of collective unconscious. That is, the amazing...