The Southern Review articles from September 1999

The Southern Review archives from September 1999

When the Snow Fell.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... and blunted every cornice, post, edge, and nook, the neighborhood metastasized into a children's book where the chicks wear bows and the oaks look like butlers. To see and then (climbing out of...

Written on the Inside Cover of a Book of Poetry.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Suddenly the situation is clear. Poetry is a commercial enterprise, like strip-mining. What is mined is pathos, and others' lives become our livings--a conceptual rhyme we learned from corporations, where the democratic...

Plato on the Beach.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... While the seagulls reproduced their shapes as shadows, eyebrow-soft, upon the stony beach and the sloped dunes and a million imperfections, the thought None of this is real captioned everything he saw while the...

Inevitable Move.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... When I take my daughter to the Mennonite woman who cares for her on afternoons, we pass the old brick Groves mill, winter cornfields, neat Pennsylvania Dutch farms, red barns with solid stone foundations and long white...

The Dog.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... I take the dog to the beach and people smile at me like children, the way people smile at the parents of infants. He is innocent, and seeing him they too feel innocent for a moment. The drunk woman sitting with...

Meditation upon a Snow Bunting.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... I saw them Wednesday last along Czech Road, sedate brown turned to white frenzy rising, southbound buntings from polar summer range. I've not seen any since until today, when-- just past the Amish farm where a red foal ...

Offertory: Blood Oranges.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... (spoken in the voice of Natalia Ginzburg) In the courtyard the March trees are heavy with fruit. The blossoms and their scent have gone the way of this brief winter, evaporated past loggia and clerestory. What...

An Italian Writer in London.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... (spoken in the voice of Natalia Ginzburg) This country wears on me. Everywhere system, clockwork. Reliable grind of wheel on wheel: clerks count pence, cordial and precise, passersby deliver accurate directions. ...

Letter to Rome Amherst, 1976.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... (spoken in the voice of Natalia Ginzburg) Formal expanses surround the churches here. Insipid lawns, desolate and vast, hum with voracious mosquitoes. No crowded piazzas. No towers tangling the horizon. No markets. One...

Letter to a Damaged Daughter.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... (spoken in the voice of Natalia Ginzburg) My womb was worn out by the time it housed you. Two wars, two husbands, too much, too little, too late. I might have tricked time, pushed you through before the...

After an Argument.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... We're in separate rooms, dark coming on this day toward the end of summer when clouds look as if they might unfold into pre-fall cold, and a hummingbird flashes at the window, then darts off, perhaps for good. I'm...

Water Ouzel.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Never shall you hear anything wintery from its warm breast; no pinched cheeping, no wavering notes between sorrow and joy; his mellow, fluty voice is ever turned to downright gladness. -John Muir Across the...

Self-Portrait at Midlife.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Here I am, shaking my head in the mirror, the face I find a timeline I'm more and more desperate to read. Are these birds' tracks printed at the eyes' watery margins, or this marginalia of wrinkles ...

Recitative on Cape Clear Island.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... This night is enough, this moment that never stops opening out. --Octavio Paz Cows in their rectangles of fog, and the repeated notes of a song thrush from the next, invisible field-- repetition and variation:...

Juliana's Disease.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... During the swine flu year, in Africa, Doctors were recording the sudden aches And fevers, the bleeding gums, nausea, And vomit filled with black, digested blood. There were nuns and nurses dying; there were ...

The Army Medical Museum of My Heart.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Is a two-headed baby a poem about awkwardness and love and feeling tired? Well, yes. Both look in several directions at once, both haunt and fade. Both recall some primordial ocean panoply. I would not feel strange. I'm...

Finally opening the anthology to Kunitz.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... I found him in the bathroom. Straight off he said it's as easy to lose perspective as a shoe. I inferred this from the word shriven, just as his picture told me he's a doorknob worn smooth by turnings, the hands of...

My life with a gardener.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... The screen door firecrackers closed. I find her at the sundry drawer prowling for twine. I'm nothing she sees. There's a tornado in her hair, her face is streaked with dirt like markings applied before the rituals...

My Dead Dad.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Our rue Albert apartment has this pre-Napoleonic water heater that lurches to life with a horripilating bang when, for example, Barbara is taking a bath, as she is now, and every time she turns the handle for more hot...

Teacher of the Year.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... This year last year's Teacher of the Year broke an office window having sex with a student at Laurie's university, Laurie tells me, and I say, "Ummm... broke it with what?" and she says that's what everybody wants to know,...

From the New House.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... i. Early Spring The hour we've surrendered, that will only come back to us in autumn's excess, a harvest, the hour the old gods tell us we lose to find, sets us back into the dark mornings as if we were being...

Litany.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Rain this morning is the glazed blue of the old fruit bowl on my table, a culture's stab at sky. I wake, a litany of bones betraying their secret origin in quarries where longing is a vein running through the white lode. ...

Shape/Change/Shape.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... i. This is the day you wear like a hair shirt, a sentence--so gray only the evergreens hold the light, giving it back greener, golder. A fine wind comes from the east, hones the landscape, reveals the crimson berries...

The Whistler.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... At first I think it's in my head, this unearthly melody I can't identify, but then I realize, no, it's all around me, notes filling the quad like drops of water will fill a basin to the top and beyond. I look...

Four-Leaf Clover.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... In all my unlucky life, I never found one until now, pressed between unabridged pages in an old Webster's International Dictionary, floating among an illustration of clouds like a colossal kite pulling away from earth. ...

Frost's Farm.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... We went there, my girlfriend and I, one frozen day after Christmas. The woman I left my wife and son to be with stared through the kitchen window and asked what I knew. I told her about...

The Scarecrow's Lament.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Better a head full of straw than a brain that rattles day and night. The pain of choice is always real: too many roads, too many wizards to follow. And love? He sees both sides before he even says hello: ...

Freud in London, 1939.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... There is pain in his mouth and jaw, intimate pain beyond reach of drugs. He has known it would kill him since the first signs that distant summer his grandson died. Torment in the snout and heart these sixteen years,...

Wild Blackberries.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... In memory of my brother In mid-July the blackberries were tart and firm within their sweet surrounding flesh. The full day's sun had just begun to mark itself on the hidden red as a wish for time, one week more at...

Emily.(Poem)
September 22, 1999

Comfort Me with Apples.
September 22, 1999... 1. THE ZAMORAS CAME TO HOUSTON from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1988 and settled first on Hickory Street by a dried-up spit of Buffalo Bayou. Julio Zamora has never applied for a green card; he works as a fast-food cook. His oldest son, Manuel,...

Barcode Jesus.(Excerpt)
September 22, 1999... BURL, B. CORDON, AND I HAD SAT DOWN in B. Gordon's living room for a moment, just to take a load off, and before we knew it we were hashing through the O.K. City bombing again. Though, being good Christians, we were aggrieved over the thought...

Rose.(Excerpt)
September 22, 1999... ON HER SEVENTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, Rose's husband for fifty-nine years, Major Riggs Glover, who hadn't done much for the last two decades but take long walks when the weather was good and carve pieces of wood into angels and statues of his...

In the City of X.(Fiction)
September 22, 1999... THE MORNING AFTER I LEARNED that my wife had taken a lover, my left leg began to ache. The pain excruciated. It resided in the lower half of the leg, from the knee down, where it felt as though two doctors with opposing, radical theories of...

The Owl.(Fiction)
September 22, 1999... IN MID-OCTOBER, COLTER AND I go pheasant hunting again, with Tim and Maddie and our friend Todd. Late in the afternoon a crisp north wind rattles the yellow cottonwood leaves in front of a farmhouse. We're walking along an irrigation levee...

The Greatest Poem in the World.(Review)
September 22, 1999... My TEASING TITLE MIMICS ONE by Herbert Read, from a collection of newspaper leaders published in 1945, A Coat of Many Colours. The title of his piece is "The Greatest Work of Art in the World." Because Read was an influential aesthetician who...

Seeking Family, Seeking Forgiveness: The Memoirs of Slaveholders' Great-Grandsons.(Excerpt)
September 22, 1999... IN THE LAST CHAPTER of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston imagines a conversation with the grandson of the slaveholder who owned her family. The grandson defends himself by making two pertinent points: first, he cannot...

The Use of Meter.
September 22, 1999... I AM NOT MESSING INTO THOSE OLD SQUABBLES about whether poets should use traditional meters; that's in the jurisdiction of the individual poet and poem--not to be legislated, but to be hassled out between them. Neither by adopting nor rejecting...

Bombs in Their Bosoms.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Vita Nova by Louise Gluck. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. $22.00 (cloth). Late Leisure by Eleanor Ross Taylor. Baton Rouge: LSU Press. $19.95 (cloth). THE BELLE OF AMHERST has been much on my mind lately. I have been pondering her not in the...

Evelyn Scott on Eagle's Wings above the Current.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Fighting the Current: The Life and Work of Evelyn Scott by Mary Wheeling White. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. $35.00 (cloth). WHEN SHE FLED NEW ORLEANS in 1913 with Tulane's married Dean of Tropical Medicine and plunged...