The Southern Review articles from September 1993

The Southern Review archives from September 1993

When I'm fog on a coffin lid: an interview with Allan Gurganus. (Interview)
September 22, 1993... I met with Allan Gurganus in September 1991 at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Though he lives in New York City part of each year, Gurganus had just completed a tour for his collection of stories, White People, and had come home to...

Balance. (short story)
September 22, 1993... There were enough consequences in life without looking for them. But some people made a fair living by it, and who was he to tell them they were wrong. Em sat across the desk from the court-appointed counselor, a heavyset woman with dewlaps and...

From 'Rumford: His Book.' (excerpt)
September 22, 1993... The cow was done. Ben slapped her flank and moved his head back, hot. The warm milk's streaming stopped. Flies settled by her tail. She shat. The barn cats licked the gutter when he raised the pail. He disliked the smell of it, the heat of it,...

The artist and the dwarf. (short story)
September 22, 1993... Her name was Mari Barbola. She glares out from the lower right-hand corner of Velazquez's Las Meninas, a painting which hangs in a darkened room of its own in Madrid's Prado, above a marble plaque reading La obra culminante del arte...

Congregants. (short story)
September 22, 1993... Amir's Family got robbed the day he turned ten. They lived in a first-floor apartment off Fifth Avenue, where his mother hid jewelry and his father kept cash, all of which was gone when the three of them returned from the weekend. Their...

Wishbone. (poem)
September 22, 1993... It's not a fig leaf that covers a woman's looked-at place, but a valentine. This causes much confusion for the man because he has its arrow in his groin. Next thing you know there's talk of diamonds and of mixing preachers with champagne....

Bread route. (poem)
September 22, 1993... His name was Randy Niver and he cried so hard the night he came to spend with me, we had to call his mother to come and take him home, back to the world that must've been too explicit for him to leave: his father's boot on the step-van grate...

John Cage College in the Marble Hall. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Three babies in strollers float through, violin strings dangling above their heads. Cellos crushing beneath the wheels. Next to an empty chair I stand listening to thunder roll from black and white keys. A man in a pink suit jumps up and down...

Sunday jazz. (poem)
September 22, 1993... I cube the already halved chicken breast into fifty or more pieces, think of TV commercials from those evangelists. Somalia. Children without eggs or red leaf lettuce. I put the bits of meat into my skillet, add pepper, carrots, tomato. A sauce...

Disenchantments: night thoughts for March 1991. (poem)
September 22, 1993... I Microbiologizing love, despair, Delight, bountiful dregs, the pulse can stick On its heirloom heartbeat. The wear and tear Inherited by who-we-are, echoic Molecular chronology, begins At birth. Congenital, genetic, Against...

Blessing. (poem)
September 22, 1993... For months, like a miser counting gold, I hoarded that first day in Tepeyac - the market of souvenirs and day-glo saviors, yellow tarps stretched wide enough to catch sun and lift light from us. And the milagro I bought, flat tin painted gold,...

Prayer ascending, prayer descending. (poem)
September 22, 1993... God, let me be a sensual hush, wind that ripples the olive leaves, nests in the lush frangipani, its blossoms scattered, crushed beneath my sandals, lifting into flowerwine and gravid scent - for whatever I know of source and ascent,...

The life of each seed. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Dries up in the desert, hisses around our heads as it joins all the rest; dust sifts through our fingers in Algerian cities, white buildings full of people speaking French, sand sweeping into the corners.... As withered pomegranates pile up in...

A ruminant. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Out of the Urdu, into our instant ken, ambles the gross molester of the Sphinx, our oont, or camel, hunchbacked from failed exertions, poor Ur-Punch and brigand-clown of Noah's passengers, the Hebrew gimel for the deformity it's luck to...

Song. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree. All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then They...

The bird man. (poem)
September 22, 1993... The white of that stone cottage still in my tired eye, I bump my luggage through the door and follow him down into the quick gloom. Silence claps my ears as if I walked under water, passing reefs of empty birdseed bags, toward the room where...

Valdosta. (poem)
September 22, 1993... How do I like it here? I've been young so long, being here is taking some adjustment. At first the squared-off low-rise blocks, expected stop lights regulating traffic, the sunlight on brick buildings looked familiar. A Hopper afternoon, I...

Unarmed. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Get a gun was what was offered as advice by all but the closest friend, who said: You'd shoot yourself. Out of stupidity. Or sadness. In the Blue Ridge Mountain cabin loft, lying awake alone, I stare at the timbered ceiling and - because I...

Blue star home. (poem)
September 22, 1993... The blue star displayed in a house window means knock on this door if you're chased by a bully or shadowed from school by a stranger in a car; someone will answer, will know what to do; the world as you've felt it will remain so; you're...

Guilt like salt. (poem)
September 22, 1993... After a good day, a nice supper of pasta and wine, even after making love, that one thing that can take you out of yourself, I'd find myself awake, thinking of failures or painful things, such as my son jabbing a needle twice a day into his...

Volunteer. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Once I worked Ward Three in the Veterans' Hospital, where I played pool with the Vietnam vets. As I leaned across the table, my dress rose above my knees. "Does one foot stay on the floor?" I asked. "No," said a guy in a wheelchair. The...

Carving. (poem)
September 22, 1993... "The man of the family always carves," Mother rehearsed, cutting into the rib roast. She cast glances toward Father, who hunched at the head of the table in the tallest chair, Irish linen napkin tucked into the open neck of his plaid shirt. He...

Fans. (poem)
September 22, 1993... They gather around their coach, score at the half 2-18. We stand where we are, stretch, joke about the platitudes we shall recite into the car's silence on the way home. The other side shot well, they were taller, it wasn't your day, it's only...

Harboring. (poem)
September 22, 1993... I pack carefully the green suitcase from my first marriage, twenty-seven years ago. I lay out black to be the soft-spoken, new-and-improved mother of the groom. To take my dead mother along, I put on her wedding gift, the Black-Starr watch my...

Ecclesiastical history. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Concerning the riddle of our human lives, Bede figured a swallow vanishing out of the high hall window after a short soaring through the hearth-home: emerged from winter, returned to winter. The swallow's wings whip the warm drafts rising...

Imagining American reality.
September 22, 1993... Perhaps no term is slipperier, more hotly debated, or more important than reality. As such, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a case study in what its larky protagonist calls "the struggle of humanity" - namely, how others...

Bread Without Sugar.
September 22, 1993... Walt Whitman lives. His example continues to appeal to certain American poets. Two who do end runs around the poem as exquisite vase, who walk in fields of verbal sunflowers, are Gerald Stern and Patricia Goedicke. Stern's work is free of...

Paul Bunyan's Bearskin.
September 22, 1993... Walt Whitman lives. His example continues to appeal to certain American poets. Two who do end runs around the poem as exquisite vase, who walk in fields of verbal sunflowers, are Gerald Stern and Patricia Goedicke. Stern's work is free of...

Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy.
September 22, 1993... In the preface to his fine biography of Walker Percy, Jay Tolson tells about his first meeting with the novelist. Casually dressed and with his lanky frame slumped in a chair, Percy seemed entirely at ease, but Tolson detected "a powerful,...

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: Selected Early Stories.
September 22, 1993... Many of the stories in this volume have so often appeared in anthologies that it's a pleasant jolt to see them gathered here chronologically. These twenty-seven stories lend one another new coloration, pungency: a fictional bouquet. Given Ms....

Women in Cars.
September 22, 1993... "It is better to be the magician/ than the magicked," advises the speaker in a poem at the center of Martha McFerren's Women in Cars. In its acuteness, its tension of caution and assertion, its awareness of transformative power, this is an...

The Dig.
September 22, 1993... "It is better to be the magician/ than the magicked," advises the speaker in a poem at the center of Martha McFerren's Women in Cars. In its acuteness, its tension of caution and assertion, its awareness of transformative power, this is an...

Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard.
September 22, 1993... "It is better to be the magician/ than the magicked," advises the speaker in a poem at the center of Martha McFerren's Women in Cars. In its acuteness, its tension of caution and assertion, its awareness of transformative power, this is an...

The City of Women: A Sequence of Poems and Prose.
September 22, 1993... "It is better to be the magician/ than the magicked," advises the speaker in a poem at the center of Martha McFerren's Women in Cars. In its acuteness, its tension of caution and assertion, its awareness of transformative power, this is an...