The Southern Review articles from September 1997

The Southern Review archives from September 1997

The old poet is taken in marriage. (poem)
September 22, 1997... 1. I would've bargained with anyone to have loved her first, or her alone, before I'd lived to become a heretic of disbelief: that she has come this late, has come at all. I despaired of finding metaphor or motif for "perfect love," nor even...

Story hour. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Near the parking lot, a few last red leaves swirl -- catch me, catch me if you can -- toward twilit skies scarred with late autumn's frozen bits of cirrus. Or are they contrails? A jet's roar lifts my eyes -- catch me, catch me if you...

History. (poem)
September 22, 1997... It's blood, and generals, who were the cause, Shadows we study for school. In Nashville, lines Of a Civil War battle are marked, our heroes The losers. Map clutched in one fist, my bike Wobbling, I've traced assaults and retreats, Horns blowing...

At the grave of Martha Ellis. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Today a visitor has left a rose at your feet and a few of the yellow buds sprouting on the hillside, a quarter to buy whatever it will in your stilled childhood of 1896. Misty rain and no sun for days, the silky tongues of the cherry blossoms...

Exultate. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Horses high as on the Assyrian gates, cruciform flambeaux and the dancing feet of black men swaggering with them, the Navy steel band in its shrimp boat set on wheels, then floats, more marchers, music -- this is Carnival again. Night after...

Funk. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Opening the diaper, each morning becomes the third day, when God created the earth, late in the afternoon, mountains and continents firmly in place, the waterways swinging between, He turned His attention to the lowlands, malodorous and...

Disjunction. (poem)
September 22, 1997... On my knees in my office, leaning over the metal can of waste, I squeeze my breasts to express the milk that's accrued in my graduate seminar on postmodern poetry. Six hours since the last feed and only eight weeks postpartum, the pressure's...

Catholic. (poem)
September 22, 1997... How I Miss the lurid symphonic sound of two bodies mating in the dark. Now, it's a littler tune, a brew of bodies actual and about-to-be. The cacophonous sounds -- coughs and wails, the creaking springs of aging cribs -- of those who've...

The turnstile. (poem)
September 22, 1997... In that dream, I was perplexed to see my mother in an airport. She'd flown just once, to celebrate her cancer, stalled by surgery and chemicals; she buzzed in a Cessna over the lake. I turned, and there was Gerald Stern, looking like his photo...

Plain poem. (poem)
September 22, 1997... God help me. I get full beauty in moments, in flashes. Take yesterdays a true spring, Easter-egg morning: I see him at dawn on the porch next door, folded on our neighbor's red rocker, head tucked like a mourning dove, sleeping a...

Ode to Italian fruit. (poem)
September 22, 1997... I am not Charlotte Bronte because I would have died already in childbirth, the baby dead, too. No, I am in Italy, using birth control, a type invented by the Egyptians, a scooped-out orange half, the hemisphere of rind a barrier against the...

The chicken-wire girls. (poem)
September 22, 1997... You can sing this to the tune of "Buffalo Girls, Won't You Come Out Tonight," a song that I spent many insomniac hours in college trying to deconstruct in the solitude and squalor of my graham-cracker-crumb-littered sheets. What is a buffalo...

Ashes. (poem)
September 22, 1997... My elbow joggled Johnny's arm, and Johnny -- Jesus! -- Johnny dropped the coffee can holding his sister. The can rolled jerkily, the lid spun off, and sister Rachel spilled across the black linoleum. Did I mention we'd been drinking? Everyone...

The sorrow pageant. (poem)
September 22, 1997... High and higher, beyond Guadalajara, the agave queuing up the Sierra in diagonals strict as tombstones, The road switchbacking to a narrow pass and threading to the next range, a line of trucks ahead Grinding up into the invisible...

1956. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Knock, knock, surprise, I'm a baby. The sudden weight of skin and heart, bones moving, makes me start to cry. The flesh I wear a portfolio I might still resign, my mother a place I drink, the world a toy I have cleverly assembled, white crib,...

Cocoa High School Student Council, Class of '73. (poem)
September 22, 1997... We step quietly from Florida into the future, dressed in bell-bottoms and polyester A-lines, not knowing how foolish these clothes will look today. The photographer said, Smile, and we all did, so there is no way of telling from this picture...

Interval. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Once my mother, dressing for an obligation, stepped through the moment into my eyes, half-finished, a woman in a black dress. All that she would momentarily add up to, strewn across the bed -- satin gloves, a beaded bag, the seed pearls...

From 'X in flux.' (poem) (excerpt)
September 22, 1997... 1. The articulateness of the world is the same forever but people have not learned to hear it and people have heard it and not understood. Through this articulateness we can understand everything yet we have not understood as you shall see...

The Golden Fleece: a documentary. (poem)
September 22, 1997... I saw dried-up old women on my television somewhere sink woolskins in a river. Held down with rocks, black dirt, the curly stuff seized gold, and when the women eased it up, breathed fire, each nugget a bright raisin, a knot of glories. On...

Petunia Pig. (poem)
September 22, 1997... My little sister raged upstairs, her bed an accordion of pain while summer spread down the hall, fingering and folding our legs and lungs. It's them green flies that causes it, a neighbor hissed. It's that homogenized milk and them...

Highway to New Orleans. (poem)
September 22, 1997... The thing about this state is that it's flat. You see that rolling through on 61: the only hills are in the clouds arriving in portentous rolling billows deeper south. The open emptiness of field and meadow, horizon's barrier of ancient...

War years: Baton Rouge, 1972. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Sweet Louisiana, in the days of our youth, dripping and shaped -- in one corner -- like a lady's boot dredging black mud with a delicate toe. Female, ethereal, oppressed forever by wet cumulus thunderheads tall as Ohio silos....

At fifty. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Too young for congregating in the praying corner at church, you don't want to be stuck in Harlan County forever. Your husband's done in by the mines, the hoot-owl shift. Black lung got so bad he couldn't do anything but hawk up gunk. There's...

Deep-sea fantasies. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Right here on the shore of Long Island Sound, snapper blues are running. Ravenous, they'll outright a trout twice their size, tear a live shiner from a long-shank hook like a great white shark feeding on a whale. Adolescents, they...

Covert action. (poem)
September 22, 1997... I stab at the waitress, but miss, lunge for my wife, but she's out of town, whirl about to throttle some doctor who didn't get it right, but no one falls. It's a blur. I see the sky, which has been peeled off someone's back, a section of...

Family burial. (poem)
September 22, 1997... All around water moves, rocking... slide of river, current a snake descending the tree, meets the tide returning after a night in the wilderness... men reveal themselves only with great reluctance, take years to tell a...

Rose mold. (poem)
September 22, 1997... The month of July I held the door open, and in walked the spider for my forehead. Hornets came to snip at my wrist, and as I reached to pick roses, thorns stuck the flesh until it blushed with poison, rose virus simmering through my...

Clothes from three planets. (poem)
September 22, 1997... May Winter climbs the attic to safe mothballs shimmer flutters down summer mountains December tropics 1. These T-shirts strode the avenida watched far out great gunning waves set for a long campaign Absurd...

Last ant. (poem)
September 22, 1997... They scutter in my dreams, the ants that left the flowerpot, that third plant I watched die, one of three basils rescued from the freeze. A fungus or mildew. I had to pull it up and leave the soil to dry. Then ants...

The garden, Spring, the hawk. (poem)
September 22, 1997... 1. Like a struck match: redbird, riding the wet knuckle of the longest limb of the leafless water oak, pitching glissandi over the myrtle trees. The yellow cat, one paw leveraged out of the soggy grass, then another, has nothing to do with this:...

The folder. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Folded things speak well of you when you're out of the room. They hold the near future captive, like children about to go on recess or sexual pleasure at the brim of control. I think of the pressure of your hand smoothing over the cloth...

Silencing the yard. (poem)
September 22, 1997... When I walk out the front door and down the gravel path to the mailbox or the paper, I am confronted by my garden, which has always been critical. "What do you see in her?" the aggressive hydrangeas demand, perhaps cranky with the drought and...

Staying dry. (short story)
September 22, 1997... "She'll go after Jake, mom." "Just like she did the last one." Ariel's older-than-thinkable daughters were whining their complaints against their aunt, her sister, due to arrive at high noon at the not-really-nearby San Antonio...

Chicken. (short story)
September 22, 1997... The Last Cold Front of the season came through in March. As the sun became warmer and the days longer, Gin felt the restlessness that came with spring. It was not the same restlessness she felt in the short, damp days of winter, the kind that...

Live bottomless. (short story)
September 22, 1997... In 1958, when my father had his famous affair with Carroll Byrd, I knew it before anybody. I don't know how long he was having the affair before I found out about it -- or, to be exact, before I realized it. Before it came over me. One day I...

Photographs excerpted from 'Southern Writers.'(Writing in the South XV: Images of Women in the South)(Illustration)
September 22, 1997... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

An interview with Eleanor Ross Taylor. (poet)(Writing in the South XV: Images of Women in the South)(Interview)
September 22, 1997... To our knowledge and memory the have not yet been many women poets of genius; Eleanor Ross Taylor is one. She moves oddly and freely from narratives to sustained dramatic monologues to brief lyrics, at home in them all. Her work is quirky,...

Eudora Welty: the music of her childhood.(Writing in the South XV: Images of Women in the South)(Interview)
September 22, 1997... About a year ago I began work on a book that explores music in the everyday lives of southerners. This study represents for me the culmination of thirty years of hearing, performing, recording, and thinking about the music of my homeland. ...

Robert Penn Warren: A Biography.
September 22, 1997... Cleanth brooks and Robert Penn Warren have achieved a lasting renown both for their independent efforts and their collaborations, and to many their names are fixed in a permanent coupling. The Brooks and Warren method of reading literature...

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism.
September 22, 1997... Cleanth brooks and Robert Penn Warren have achieved a lasting renown both for their independent efforts and their collaborations, and to many their names are fixed in a permanent coupling. The Brooks and Warren method of reading literature...

The sovereign of South Street. (memoir of a neighbor woman in Greensboro, Alabama)
September 22, 1997... Don't you think I have the most beautiful name in the world?" she'd ask me as I sat at her kitchen table, a glass of heavily iced bourbon on a napkin in front of each of us. "Minnie did give me the most beautiful name. Don't you think it's...

I wish I'd written that story. (lessons from an MFA fiction class)
September 22, 1997... In 1971 I began my long writer's apprenticeship as an MFA student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The fiction class met on Thursday nights in a cramped, dismal smoky room on the first floor of McIver Hall, whose...

The Collected Poems.
September 22, 1997... The most obvious thing about the literary tradition is that every writer belongs to it, and one of the most interesting questions you can ask about a writer is how he or she connects with the literature of the past. Reynolds Price, like others...

Understanding Reynolds Price.
September 22, 1997... The most obvious thing about the literary tradition is that every writer belongs to it, and one of the most interesting questions you can ask about a writer is how he or she connects with the literature of the past. Reynolds Price, like others...

Souls Raised from the Dead.
September 22, 1997... In a 1983 column for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley observed that most of the "interesting and/or admirable writers" of contemporary American fiction were women. A number of those he listed were southern -- Doris Betts, Robb Forman Dew,...

Body of Knowledge.
September 22, 1997... In a 1983 column for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley observed that most of the "interesting and/or admirable writers" of contemporary American fiction were women. A number of those he listed were southern -- Doris Betts, Robb Forman Dew,...

Familiar Heat.
September 22, 1997... In a 1983 column for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley observed that most of the "interesting and/or admirable writers" of contemporary American fiction were women. A number of those he listed were southern -- Doris Betts, Robb Forman Dew,...

Saving Grace.
September 22, 1997... In a 1983 column for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley observed that most of the "interesting and/or admirable writers" of contemporary American fiction were women. A number of those he listed were southern -- Doris Betts, Robb Forman Dew,...

Ladder of Years.
September 22, 1997... In a 1983 column for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley observed that most of the "interesting and/or admirable writers" of contemporary American fiction were women. A number of those he listed were southern -- Doris Betts, Robb Forman Dew,...

Their boats passing. (mother's death, Southern family memories)
September 22, 1997... Her voice is tired, but perks up when we start to talk about the shopping we'll do when she visits in October. Just a few weeks, I remind her: the leaves will be at their peak, maybe we'll go all the way to Boston, visit the museum, duck into...

Art in the American South.
September 22, 1997... Sculptor James Surls once said, "If you live in New York and you look out your window and you create art from what you see -- buildings or air conditioning ducts or whatever -- for some reason it's called world-class. But if you live in East...