The Southern Review articles from March 2003

The Southern Review archives from March 2003

Note.(Dave Smith leaves The Southern Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2003... In announcing his departure from The Southern Review in the Autumn 2002 issue Dave Smith gave as his principal motivation--and a very good one it is--that he felt the need to serve the muse of his own imagination. We wish him well in that and...

Union Sniper.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... In the distance the yellow rocks of the chimney waver like a stem of phlox. The window glares deep red from the setting sun. Now beyond my scope the light drops, the lamp turns on, the room fills with movement. You...

Written in Exile.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Eve and Adam leased a Maui condo one mile south of Kapalaua Bay just off lower Honoapiilani Highway. Through their wall-of-glass sliding window, they stepped out to their lanai at six or so to toast the fireball sunset...

A Gulf Stream Ode.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... in memoriam Laura Allende 1907-1984 To the west of us, like an untold epic, Huge and silent, written in air and water, Nutrient salts, cold walls, and foggy banks Dissolving in each other, threading their ways ...

The Country of Still Waters.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... I went again, from the country of flux, To the country of still waters. An old stone house, a mother and two daughters Laying the same ghost, unweaving the hex Like retted flax. To have loved, to have hated--Now, to...

The Whaling Station.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... One by one, the secondhand images Break away, and the ice cap of the world Starts drifting north, as if it could ever enter This hemisphere of doubt and knowledge. Bergs Nine-tenths below surface Everyone...

The Light in My Mother's Kitchen.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Light in My Mother's Kitchen Three green tomatoes on the windowsill, dead offerings the household gods do not refuse. My mother is not here, but the bulb glows in the small house of the oven where something firm...

Hoping to Fix Up, a Little, This World.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Hoping to Fix Up, a Little, This World (The title is a line from Larry Levis) The cat we've named Basho plays with the ghost cat who slips from bamboo to drink at the pond when the sun begins to fall. Our other...

The Weight of August.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Weight of August The exhaustion of flowers, midafternoon, the stale sun's spillage and stutter across the lawn, a sprinkler lifting its tired arc and letting it fall. All things moving to an end. In the love seat...

This Sky Demands a Certain Patience.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... This Sky Demands a Certain Patience With all this sky to cross how can Jesus find you? Surely there's too much of it, even for one who's called the Lord of Light. You try to find the stone that speaks in tongues. The...

Streetfighting.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Streetfighting When my sister fell into the house crying, holding her face, I knew even before she pulled back her hands what her boyfriend Benny had done. I ran upstairs to get my sneakers even though it was...

At Wendell's Garage, Downeast Maine (or, The Way Life Should Be).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... At Wendell's Garage, Downeast Maine (or, The Way Life Should Be) So here I'm happily cornered, in the Pine Tree State, from which, at eight, I brought back my friend Ward's adverb wicked, to sprinkle into my...

Gulu Town.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Gulu Town I named the goat Trouble because I believed the name would add some humor to his death. He was black and when the witch doctor's blade sawed at his throat, it made the sound of bed sheets being ripped to rags...

For the Annapolis-Baltimore Railway Line.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... For the Annapolis-Baltimore Railway Line The bench under the waiting-room window where the afternoon sunlight lay and the ticket counter's dusty glass top are gone, invisible within the new hotel's anonymous hallways....

Gagarin Street.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Gagarin Street When I was a child I lived on Gagarin Street. Today it's called Pilsudski Street. Ten years ago the sun rose, a little wind blew, a little bird sang, a little empire fifty kilometers away fell, and...

Peskeompskut Falls.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Peskeompskut Falls On this Massachusetts bridge, the only shepherd pipes Are sirens wailing for a teenage drunk, The only ghosts mosquitoes sipping blood. Deep in cement graves beside the falls, Turbines spin black...

Mount Zion road.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Mount Zion Road Nameless, this road was just a number when I moved here. County Road 752, upslope past 721's right angle turn to the Glen, past the white fence bridge over Joe's Creek, the immaculate garden of Ruby...

Old Windows.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Old Windows Back of the new house built out of old and new materials someone stacked eight old windows against the open porch. Half-stripped, half-weathered, four still claim the color of the forest, four the darker red of...

His Own Sweet Own.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... His Own Sweet Own Trouble is hard. Not finding it is harder. The cat close-walks the edges of the room finding the trail out, the circuit past the strewn bottles, a jump over the sill and gone. You go limping left, ...

Smack.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Smack Fire is how the day goes vicious, someone burning. The baby lies in filth and you keep moving, to keep ahead of death. The man's not showed seventeen hours and she's still screaming as she burns her hands slowly...

Profane.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Profane You grow up at last and regret it all. You sit cornered so no one can get at you, thin scabbard hanging on your belt, the blue knife whetstoned to the same edge you have in your eyes. There are two rifles in the...

Fight.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Fight I saw a man's cheek taken off by a swung hoe, his molars shining sudden in the pickup's lights, teeth grinding as he dropped. Wild nights, too much liquor, wilder women, men at their steady work. PATRICK LANE's...

Range.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Range Town dogs will run a cow and eat her teats off still alive in her stagger. They whine the same way just before you shoot them, servile and ashamed, tails tucked under, groveling. They will pull down anything just...

Ash.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Ash She was ash-white and broken by the North, three kids, and a logger who never came home. She was moon and wanting more, a slip of silk she never had. When she came to me with her artificial pearls I tore them off...

After Two Paintings by Stanley Greaves.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... After Two Paintings by Stanley Greaves 1. Madonna with Pumpkin For all her nude allure, seated on the velvety plush of an armchair, and her cool caste of features (slight in-suck of cheeks and flat-to-scalp...

The Manatee.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Manatee Beneath the ragged dock, the gray cold water lapped in miniature whitecaps against the foreign rock. The tidal, martyred St. Johns, falling away at noon toward an invisible moon, glared...

Darwin.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Darwin Darwin declared the natural advantage of every cruel behavior our bodies show, instinct like a soprano taking stage to sing an aria we never quite know. WILLIAM LOGAN has published five books of poems, and his...

The Poems in the Voice of Daniel Boone.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Three Poems in the Voice of Daniel Boone "D. Boon Kilt Bar on this Tree, 1760" It's true, I've had my trouble spelling easy words like bear, though I've killed one with my bare hands; and some men would have felt this...

A Brief Religious Inquiry.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... A Brief Religious Inquiry The Shawnees must have twenty-seven gods. My brother Squire has one. He says God's eye is even on the sparrow. Could it be a sleepy eye? My brother is a miller. I say he should at least...

On the Season on Rain.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... On the Season of Rain I condemn the sky for raining six disdainful days straight. I curse the swollen river, which has swallowed axes and hides, forbidding me to cross without a toll. A man confined is like an oak tree...

White Gowns Shuffling.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... White Gowns Shuffing The door locks heavily, Sinatra suddenly booms; happy hour in the rec room. Phantoms flicker across the tube at the nurses' station. Slow shuffle, linoleum gloom. Two white gowns per...

Brighton Beach in Winter.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Brighton Beach in Winter The boardwalk, sunlit, traverses the panorama of old Brooklyn, the stern matrons of Russia watching, from benches, the ocean unravel. Slipcover chatter hides, in breezes, small massacres: secrets...

Above the Tanana: for Muriel Morgan (1914-2001).(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Above the Tanana: For Muriel Morgan (1914-2001) May 15, 2001 Against the river's westward flow, a brace of mallards, as I scope them out, flutter and swerve, full of their own quack-quacking and a part of the...

Mourning Cloak.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Mourning Cloak Fairbanks, June 9, 2001 for my son, Jeff, also a poet Sandbars channeling the flow, a floatplane skimming low above the river, and, capping the ghostly front range, purple avatars of snow. Brooding...

Zennor Crows.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Cornwall Row by row is how fields gash. They throw some crows into a gust, pinched little show. Mud or muck can't think up one last crow. But each dawn crows boomerang hack. On the roof of a piggery in ruin ...

Penwith Crows.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Penwith Crows Crows squint into dusk the boatlights outlast and the thousand small sad lies stand looking out of the private dark of the body, out of rant and rhapsody and joy, out of love and out of the father's boy...

Installation.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Installation In a small white room undisturbed on scuffed oak boards sits a basketball whose marmalade skin is froggishly textured, curved lines pointing downwards, accentuating its stillness here, where...

Coffee Maker.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Coffee Maker Alone, one can but toy with imagery. --James Merrill, "Hourglass" Sobriety kicks me out of half-slept sleep again. Unbound and starved for a routine that favors day, I'm drawn toward this machine-- the...

Pink Salmon.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Pink Salmon Adult pink humpback salmon lose their sheen as they prepare to spawn. As they leave the ocean, the river strips the metal in layered rips from their sides--a release in the body's weave, the gown...

Two Looks.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Two Looks For Paul Hazelton, in memoriam ... life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? --Elizabeth Bishop, "Poem" We were lunching at the cafe in Union, Maine, hot soup, ...

Wells Cathedral, Afloat.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Wells Cathedral, Afloat Light spreads it maplike on the water's glass-topped table, sleeks the seamless join of sky and stone. Light's ripples whisper to your soul this is the real cathedral Where liquid air laps...

Cross Road Blues.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Cross Road Blues They live at the cross road, this old couple some folks know as Mama Soul and Papa Body, some as Mama Body and Papa Soul. Live in the same old house, but since they're blind and forever lose and...

The Boy Soldier.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Boy Soldier When we overwhelm a village, I am told to make sure none will ever pull a trigger. I go in with a machete, come out with a sack of hands. They count the pairs; feed me. In the dark I...

Pelt.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Pelt I found the world's pelt nailed to the picture rail of a box room in a cheap hotel. So that's why rivers dry to scabs, that's why the grass weeps every dawn, that's why the wind feels raw: the...

The Pathologist.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Pathologist Autopsy means "to see with one's own eyes." I have seen too much. I strip away all evidence of health: perfect livers pale as sand at ebb tide, lungs light and intricate as coral, kidneys...

Hieronymus and the Lion.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Hieronymus and the Lion Legends grow slowly and askant the truth: time confounds them or entwines their heroes like vines so that they'll bear a single flower. The slave Androcles, spared in the arena by the lion...

St. Jerome's Nightmares.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... St. Jerome's Nightmares Lurking in my grim sleep--a demon, antlered and sinister, his ur-breath toxic, his smirk fusty, corrosive, a scythed curse. Always unbidden, yet he comes nearly nightly--a lewd gargoyle whose...

Shame.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Shame I keep referring to you in transition from one state of being to another like a woman you see on two or three different buses in the same afternoon. But this is not shame exactly or anything numinous and I can't...

Monkeys in White Satin.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Monkeys in White Satin Now and then you catch a glimpse of space invaders moving around under the bridge--campers, someone says. Once--this may be a dream--the road by my house was lined with blossoming plums. White like ...

Child's Play.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Child's Play I got stranded down South America way, drunk laid out among Indian borrachos, drunk, couldn't care less. We drank posture, or no, posto, a muddy liquid squeezed from roots through bark cloth into leaf...

Call Girls.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Call Girls My rage, you bet, and its spectacular aftermath, the visits from the cops, the cut-rate pharmacies where I bought medicine, the all-night theaters I retired to, let me justify this, the...

Tobacco.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Tobacco Professor R. poured a cup of coffee, and placed before her on the seminar table her text, The Riverside Shakespeare, her horn-rimmed tortoiseshell eyeglasses, several ballpoint writing pens, a box of...

Loch Ness Monster.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Loch Ness Monster Big diamond-shaped head high above the water, the reptile moving swan-like, more powerful and lovely than the nuclear subs at Glasgow, it retreated from the night light and I turned in my hotel...

Down the Road, Out of Sight.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Down the Road, Out of Sight We used to walk the vacant summer roads past weed fields where finches chased mayflies. At his side Dad's right hand would pivot, blossom, and clinch. "I'd see my father," he said, "move his...

Since I Go Back and Forth about You.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Since I Go Back and Forth about You Your silences. Your unwillingness to play along. Your fear of midnight coughing or the sump pump's drain and click. Your secret vanity. Your dislike of swimming pools and idle...

The Reliquary.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Reliquary The world with its dangers submits to me, my spells, my potions, for I outrank the heavens, and with that blasphemy which makes better my heart, I tap the seatbelt, the helmet, the...

The Dinner Guest.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Dinner Guest Let's begin with dinner, the menu: oiled lettuce, lemon juice, broken bread, noodles spun with crushed tomatoes, and the matchstick julienne of fennel and skin of an orange. I'm not angry...

The Magician.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Magician In the tent at the carnival, the magician showed us The woman's smiling head all by itself In a box on a table with nothing under it Except for the mirrors I knew all about. I'd learned about all his...

Breakfast.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Breakfast By the window, my girls are eating eggs and cereal And reading out loud the riddles and the rules On the back of the box. They want to enter the contest And win something amazing. Across the street, Half on...

The Pickpocket.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Pickpocket He knows where you've hidden them. He knows Your hiding places better than you do. Here come light fingers slyly taking away Your private numbers, your house key, your folding money, Your credit, your...

Judging a Hog.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Judging a Hog Adapted from The Elements of Livestock Judging by W. W. Smith, 1927 He must be observed from both sides and the front And from above while you are standing close At a rear view. The common defects: light...

Literature in the 21st Century.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Literature in the 21st Century Sometimes I wish I drank coffee or smoked Marlboros, or maybe cigars-- yes, a good Cuban rum-soaked cigar in its thick manly wrapping, the flash of the match between worn matchbook...

What*ev*er--.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... What*ev*er-- the three syllables my father exhaled to punctuate each shrug, his secular version of Jesus Christi once surgeons had scraped away the last black cells of belligerence; later channeled from some...

Backrub.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Backrub There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. --Poe, quoting Bacon, in "Ligeia" Her pale & plum-splotched skin hung in voluminous folds like stained bedsheets, like the hand-me-down...

American Eel.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... American Eel Anguilla rostrata My quick & kindling daughter bolted ahead as we approached the abandoned wharf, light flashing off burial mounds slick with silt & salt marshes raveling the bay. We were not quite...

Stridulation.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Stridulation In the insect room at the Louisville Science Center, waiting for the next IMAX presentation of Dolphins, I learned that termites, with great cooperative skill (and equal part saliva), build mounds the...

As Water.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... As Water Continental Divide My washed hands steam like the peaks after rain. The vapors drift like the dirt, a cloud of lead and iron and gold in the stream's clear weather. As the sunflower ...

Fanney.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Fanney Ohatchee, Alabama Hidden like a sentry, the furnace blooms with sumac, crawls with lizards. It smokes off rain so hard you can hear them breathe, one breath lifting granite, pulling coal, the...

Doc's boy.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... Earl barrow wanted to take me hunting. He had no idea what he was doing. Neither did I. We were a man and a boy looking one way, walking another. He had loved my father. The two men were best friends and very close. My father was a doctor....

Enchante.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... At eight o'clock, just as the August heat began to withdraw from the day, leaving it weakened, much as a fever does a body, Pierre, a man on the eve of retirement, left his desk and the embarrassment of documents he had spread haphazardly...

If my mother's soul can hear.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... I AM IN THE KMART across the street from the hospital, holding the blue sweater in one hand and the green sweater in the other, checking out the prices as my mother sleeps in the Intensive Care Unit, letting a ventilator breathe for her. ...

At random.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... IN DAYLIGHT THE ROAD between the nameless bar and Random's East Side Pawn was surely bleak, but on a rainy November night the pavement shimmered beneath a sea of neon colors. To the couple in the car, the little strip of civilization appeared...

World enough and Woolf.
March 22, 2003... I WOKE UP ONE MORNING not too long ago and said: I don't think we can read Virginia Woolf anymore without confronting the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. I said "we" because I wanted to sound like those critics she once wrote about, the...

Memories of Holden Caulfield--and of Miss Greenwood.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... TWO YEARS AGO, the fiftieth anniversary of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye took place. The book is almost exactly the same age I am. To be precise, it's about three months younger: I appeared in April 1951, the novel--after a much...

Enduring modernism: Stark Young and the Nashville Agrarians.
March 22, 2003... IT IS DOUBTFUL THAT ANY mature letter of Henry James was ever read with such consummate indifference as the one he wrote in 1913 to Stark Young. Visiting Fanny Prothero during an English trip, "the delightful young man from Texas" had neither...

Prison art and civic pride.
March 22, 2003... WHEN I WAS NOT QUITE EIGHT YEARS OLD, my mother confirmed what the kid downstairs had taunted me about. My father was indeed in prison. The kid's mother had noticed that the letters my mother received every day were from the federal facility in...

The indispensable guide.(The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... JOSEPH FLORA AND LUCINDA MAGKETHAN make their aims clear early in their massive thousand-plus-page volume: "We wished for something that would do for southern literature what The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989) had done for southern...