The Southern Review articles from September 1998

The Southern Review archives from September 1998

IN MEMORIAM.
September 22, 1998... Donald E. Stanford (February 7, 1913-August 25, 1998) Don Stanford was appointed Coeditor of The Southern Review (together with Lewis P. Simpson) when the journal was reinstituted at LSU in a new series in 1963, and he continued in that...

Night-Light.
September 22, 1998... I stand terrified beside you, flushed in the pale night-light and asleep while the moon comes up dragging impossible night like a sacked weight behind. What is or was or comes to be I bless because I must. ...

The Nun Who Died That Summer.
September 22, 1998... On the day we realized how sick she was, she walked in wobbly and weathered, her whole being smelling like leaves on a cold day. She said, Repetez, mes enfants, "Bonjour," and I heard something like a tearing in her...

Snow Deer.
September 22, 1998... One would take them for clumps of brush and branches, antlers still and dark against a gravelly sky-- or for stones, the stones of the mind, seeming immobile, yet suddenly gone, browsing on another slope of...

In the Abbaye d'Ardenne.
September 22, 1998... After a rain cleared out the sulking sky, the summer's twilight serendipity became an artist's palette, lapis, rose, and gold--a pagan festival replayed as if in memory of Celtic gods. Its ashes settle as the night...

After Reading Hilda Morley's "Made Out of Links".(poem)
September 22, 1998... Today I came on a poem set in the present tense, written yonks ago, that I'd give anything, barring our moments together, to have come up with to you-- words in a comely order fitting snugly as...

V.
September 22, 1998... In a villa high in the hill country I'm struggling to find a comfortable position in one of those old, heavy deck chairs, with a real wooden frame and striped canvas, that opens and closes into and out of itself. It...

Like Dervishes.
September 22, 1998... The lighthouse rises from behind a hill, a mild surprise when I expect nothing more than a dip to the shore in the rhyme of field and sea. As I drive close by, it soars in the gap like a needle left standing after some...

Room and Chair.
September 22, 1998... Fluorescence evens out the scenery in the ward; six other women lie draped on mattresses. A nurse answers the soft buzz of a phone. The woman two beds down died, you say. I hand you another photograph. Weekend, West...

The Details of the Soil.
September 22, 1998... Not yet, I haven't taken a bite, But the woman who offers me clay Says "Go on," and waits as if I am Sniffing at the end of a leash. The dirt-eaters she knows are hundreds Of miles from her driveway, and they've...

The Illustrated Life.
September 22, 1998... At Woolworth's, in Pittsburgh, one counter showed seventy feet of Davy Crockett-- telephones, T-shirts, and six fat stacks of coonskin caps--but all I owned were the cards I counted, from Tennessee to the Alamo, and a...

The Fourth.
September 22, 1998... 1. When, at last, in the shallows of late afternoon, light's low tide, where he floats each day, face- down in his locked chair, having flailed for hours and failed again to reach the shore of the other world--the...

An incidental report on my grandmother's divinity.
September 22, 1998... My grandmother had 14 children, 56 grandchildren, 57 great and 1 great-great and a packet of coffee in her coffin and a love for the church that anyway had the roof tarred on the day of her funeral. She was 87...

Signals.
September 22, 1998... From there we'd walk open land to the apple trees in the orchard, so often, so many times, but that day: a locked gate, an electric barbed-wire fence, and two huskies silent and ominous as Dante's beasts. They were not...

On the Grass.
September 22, 1998... Things happen so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and they feel so natural that it's a while before you take out a pad and a pen to mark the grave of the life that's just happened, that's just over. My grandsons and I...

Returning to the Luxapalila.
September 22, 1998... The river is the color of earth, fed by runoff from pastures and fields of cotton and corn. Kneeling by the water near a shale outcropping, I shatter my face and settle my outspread hand, palm up, until it fades from sight...

Hazard.
September 22, 1998... Down Reed Road, about a mile from the house on the sharp curve that makes routine ice even worse, the rotting sweet-gum leaned as if it had a promise to keep to the dogwood on the other side. Riddled by...

The Spring Water.
September 22, 1998... i. The View Below, the valley held a pond, the ruddy brick farmhouse, cows on the slope. The land was a sunken green from which all else would circle out. Nothing subterranean or outlaw, and never a thought...

The Mission Olive.
September 22, 1998... It's time, the day says, as it always does, the coming rains will rake them from the tree if you don't first, the olives, huge from months of purpling like a hammerer's ripe thumb. The lawn's peppered already ...

Once More with Mother on the Beach.
September 22, 1998... --Florida, 1997 Is that seagull limping? my mother asks, handing me the binoculars. Listen... I think it's crying for help. Sciatic, all but deaf these days, and bothered now ...

The Marriage of Helen.
September 22, 1998... For Helen Domagulski, whom I never knew Nineteen and fifteen, not smiling, my grandfather and his illiterate child bride are having their picture taken.... I want to suppose it's noon--...

The Four Fates.
September 22, 1998... The Greeks had words for them. They were the Parcae: The Spinner, the Measurer, and the One with the Scissors, The three determined, predetermining sisters, Who reigned like the Queens of Taste over man's fate. Clotho...

The Immortalist.
September 22, 1998... With chopsticks poised. Peter Cordero drove into the onion cake and spicy smoked ham at the Hunan on Sansome Street. At home in New Orleans he worked as a food spy, even though he enjoyed eating too much to send anything back, which is what he...

Leufredus.
September 22, 1998... WEN I WAS PREGNANT WITH MY FIRST CHILD, thirty-one women in Oxford, including my stepdaughter, Tippy, were due to give birth within three months of each other. Theories abounded as to the cause of this phenomenon--a record-breaking cold winter,...

Artifacts.
September 22, 1998... IT SEEMS MARGARET HAS BEEN in the kitchen since the beginning of time. Since sunlight she's been cooking--kneading dough for bread, chopping, slicing, measuring out her day on the big oak counter next to the stove. Every few minutes she stops...

Boys to Men: Recent Poetry in Review.
September 22, 1998... I have recently returned to one of my favorite poems from youth, Whitman's "There Was a Child Went Forth": There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became, And that object...

The Sins of the Fathers: Lillian Smith and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin.
September 22, 1998... IN AMERICAN LETTERS, THE TERM "CONVERSION NARRATIVE" usually refers to a form of expression that arose in New England in the seventeenth century--either such written works as Cotton Mather's lengthy Paterna and Jonathan Edwards's much briefer...

Disorderly Orders: Free Verse, Chaos, and the Tradition.
September 22, 1998... At present, the term "free verse" is used to describe a multitude of quite different and even contradictory strategies, several of which may be employed in the same poem. If metrical poetry can be defined as verse in which strong and weak...

A Life of the Mind.
September 22, 1998... FOR HALF A CENTURY MARTIN LEBOWITZ practiced the honorable profession of middleman of ideas. He took ideas where he found them, which seems to have been almost everywhere, and transformed them into reviews on an astonishing variety of subjects...

The World of a Wounded Family.
September 22, 1998... Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes... --William Faulkner BATTLEGROUNDS OF MEMORY begins with Clay Lewis's recollection...

Other Voices: A Life in Gossip.
September 22, 1998... George Plimpton's oral biography of Truman Capote appears at a time when interest in Capote's life would seem to be at a low ebb. An official biography, the stage play Tru, extant chapters of the famously uncompleted novel Answered Prayers,...