The Southern Review articles from September 2006

The Southern Review archives from September 2006

Cleanth Brooks.(Brief article)
September 22, 2006... on the 100th anniversary of his birth, October 2006 The Humanities are in their present plight largely because their teachers have more and more ceased to raise normative questions, hve refrained from evaluation.... Yet, if they are to be...

Cups.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Cups In the hollow of my hand, in the cup the hollow makes, water fills what I can't think of as a cup, you have to move so quickly down to it. And would a real cup leak? Would holes open so easily...

Proof.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Proof to A. V. Christie That goldfinches go to yellow is proof that sustenance comes in a form resembling, pleasing, not to be fought for but found like bearings by a light both given and...

Portion.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Portion My portion of the sky today unwinds a foot of gauze, the fraction of a mouth goes by, a tip of wing, a gist and then the brightness has to turn up only a little to make the lamp in here completely...

And Who Shall Maintain the Luck-Strewn Bestiaries of the Hills? And Who Shall Discipline the Lakes?(Poem)
September 22, 2006... And Who Shall Maintain the luck-strewn bestiaries of the hills? And Who shall Discipline the Lakes? A mere drizzle is no tragedy: You make for indoors and hold your plans for the lake for another day. The hills hug and hoard...

And What, Really, Is "The Monotony of the Sublime"?(Poem)
September 22, 2006... And What, Really, is "The Monotony of the Sublime"? Who knows if the angels hiding in the stairwell are really as bored as they seem to be this Saturday morning, or if they have simply tired of the large, Vesuvian possibilities...

And, In the Face of Such Suffering, What Else To Do but Go On?(Poem)
September 22, 2006... And, In the Face of Such Suffering, What Else To Do but Go On? There are heroic people in the world: They board planes and light out for afflicted regions, they do not merely write out checks or shake their heads with the...

A fence between our homes.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS: I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer. And that is why you should be kind to me. I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer that has spread into my liver and my bones and that...

Questions for Silence.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Questions for Silence In its first thin tide. In the place to which it's come like a stranger. Where the day is a map you cannot read, crickets begin in the warm night to whirr green songs they could not unlearn...

Such as Myself.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Such as Myself How can one forget each day to eat something or palm dry gobs of vitamins or eye the nubile bark of the pink dogwood burning like adolescence right there in the miserable scrub of land, in what no...

Rock Maples.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Rock Maples By other names, these trees seem sweeter yet; this older one's a homage to the strength ringing its bird's-eye grain, this best beloved of maples, generous in sap and hue. So near to an ideal, its...

Trout Tenets.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Trout Tenets The first time fishing brought him up as high as Houlton, Booker had a homily to offer brother-in-law Reverend Quigg, who'd left the Berwick church after ten years to lead a congregation in the north. ...

We lived in a school.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... THE OLD WOMEN WERE BATHING MIA in the cafeteria sink behind the serving line. When she stood, water lapped at her knees; and when she squatted it was like the ocean. There was room to paddle. One of the women said, "Stand up, child. We rinse...

Sparrows.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Sparrows A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all. He replied: the ubiquity of sparrows. --ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI, Another Beauty Sparrow: our generic for any of the...

Luna Moths.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Luna Moths The first time I woke up crying From a puddle of sleep and found it Fluttering against a wall Like a dying leaf of spring green light. The second I found lying lightly On the ground, newly dead....

The Addict.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... The Addict Because she is a good girl and an A student, with a name--Charlotte (after Charlotte Bronte)--only an English professor's daughter could have, you're not prepared when she tells you what's really wrong,...

House of Women.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... House of Women These wash beautifully. --MRS. NESTA For months I would find them, at the bottom of the buffet, top of the china cabinet, slipped between pages of a yellowed owner's manual--remember to cover the...

In the Name Of.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... In the Name Of We wondered what to call that cookout, after we buried our grandmother and were chewing our bitterness. Every betrayer except our grandmother sat down with their betrayed. We had chicken and hot...

Midnight Marriage.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Midnight Marriage I lied about the aching in my ear. I lied about the funny thing, the time, your repertory kisses. My habit's insincerity, yours faith. When I confess the brush is on the nightstand, I lie. It's ...

In the leaves.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... THEY FOUND THE FIFTH BODY a mile and a half into Schnitke's woods, and then, after combing another mile, Hansen found the shooter. The rifle lay in the leaves beside the shooter's body, which looked, already, like nothing more than a lump of...

Intoxication at Carmel-by-the-Sea.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Intoxication at Carmel-by-the-Sea There was a wish to alter consciousness. Of course, there always was. We poured half orange juice, half Beefeater, in two glasses, pinched our noses and quickly gulped it down. The...

Gullet.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Gullet Gnarled vision: a dark fist rooting among the branches for ripe berries, like a body of black starlings whose gold beaks break and split into a clatter of knives in neighborhood air. I hear them...

Along the River of Forgetting.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Along the River of Forgetting Ruined mansions passed, relics of the Hudson School, a paradise more desirable because closed for business. The train rocked back and forth across an open sheet of black water. ...

The Lost Boy.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... The Lost Boy He seemed no more than a character in the pages of a Hardy novel. Where was his soul, flickering through the dunes? The sea's night-foil glittered. In yellow slickers, men from the town blasted...

Crossroads.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... ENGLAND, 1962. At night we slept, my brother upstairs with the ghost in the vast quiet range under the roof, the women and Dennis and girls below in large rooms off the long hallway, door after closed door, the moon shining brightly...

A Tenth-Century Pew End in the Faroes.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... A Tenth-Century Pew End in the Faroes After Surtsey's volcanic slopes, red and black as those barrels of ash and clinkers I lugged from coal cellars as a kid, I came to the Vestmanna Islands, place of the West Men or...

A Reliquary.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... A Reliquary Soaking and tilting the woods, a storm too late in the year to be named drew offshore for the Maritimes, and I went out walking the wrack line for whatever rarity might have churned up-- a boat's...

Interventions.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Interventions Smoking an Upmann Lonsdale from Havana, drinking a pint of Guinness, I sat in the November sun watching a late dragonfly, golden in her chapel-window wings. It seemed necessary to declare the...

Snapshots of Our Afterlife.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Light for traveling as two cherry petals, we make the transition in impulsive gusts. Or thread our way behind a wandering doe-- a god of the crossroads, avuncular, nods. Islands erupting over thousands of...

A Gentle Man.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... A Gentle Man Edwin Partridge (1923-2005) Barely nineteen, volunteered for the war. On a sweaty Pacific island monitored radar, hearing pilots rumble off into black; silently noted which friends didn't...

A symposium: the pastoral.(Association of Writers and Writing Programs)(Conference notes)
September 22, 2006... THESE REFLECTIONS ON THE PASTORAL are the result of a panel discussion presented at the 2004 convention of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). During three previous AWP presentations, we examined the elegy, the love poem, and...

The pastoral: first and last things.(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2006... I came here for the view, and what is there to see? The place is still a place in progress--JOHN KOETHE I WANT TO BE SPECIFIC HERE IN DEFINING "PASTORAL." I intend my references to be directed to pastoral as a noun rather than an...

Meditative spaces.(pastoral poetry)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... In HIS BOOK PASTORAL (1999), Terry Gifford argues that in the contemporary moment, the pastoral can be "attributed to anything ranging from the rural, to any form of retreat, to any form of simplification or idealization," citing examples of...

Pastoral matters.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... THERE'S A LITERARY STORY--probably apocryphal--that the eighteenth-century pastoralist James Thomson was once observed plucking a peach off a tree on the estate of one of his patrons--George Lyttleton at Hagley, I believe-then eating the peach,...

Arcadia redux.(pastoral poetry)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... IN THE PASTORAL TRADITION, love appears in myriad forms. The pasture's ease and retirement are the attracting force when Virgil sings "let the country charm me, the rivers that channel its valleys,/then may I love its forest and stream, and let...

Pastoral.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Pastoral August, swift fisted with heat, uppercuts us and leaves, as apology, corn. Cob and husk we bury, pluck the kernels for false teeth and grin, bogus as crop circles. Someone's burning poison ivy. Here the...

Letter from Down the Shore.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Letter from Down the Shore They've collapsed the bungalows that lined the coast and put up condos. Now three families walk and sleep and feast where there was one, thank God (there's war, and growth is good). In high...

Freak Show.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Freak Show On some daytime TV talk show you get to see the human spectrum-midgets, giants, fatties, oldies-each with a lover, if seen elsewhere, you'd find unremarkable. It's meant to titillate, of course, ...

Mole.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Mole This poem began its life as a thought about wild beasts but somehow slithered away toward death, which is surely the next big safari or absolutely nothing. Funny how the mind gallops along with whatever...

Airplane.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... I GET INTO MY SEAT PRETTY EARLY and look at my book here and there but mostly feel edgy to see if I'll luck out and keep my elbow room, the plane filling up and my heart beating in its cozy pocket with the suspense as seats are claimed but not...

In the Storm.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... In the Storm Some black ducks were shrugged up on the shore. It was snowing hard, from the east, and the sea was in disorder. Then some sanderlings, five inches long with beaks like wire,...

Invitation.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Invitation Oh do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy and very important day for the goldfinches that have gathered in a field of thistles for a musical battle ...

A Lump of Coal.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... A Lump of Coal I wasn't sure I heard her at first because of the wind with everything in it, textbooks and ice cream and chinchillas and stars made of paper and glitter and glue. She was standing by the...

Greenhouse Sparks and Snow.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Greenhouse Sparks and Snow It is night and my grandfather potters around, grafting various geraniums to other geraniums, goading to life brilliant hybrids to amaze the window boxes of his cadre of aging customers, and for...

Report from the Empty Room.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Report from the Empty Room Hello. Hello. Either you're listening somewhere, or I'm a fool again, tripping on my old tongue, tangled as it is with so much confusion, which I suppose I have to think of as...

Building Road.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Building Road From the chunk stone and hard rubble left out for dump trucks to pick up in the late light remaindered from a day short from the start, they were to make flat road, the horizon the long-term goal, the...

Button.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... WE CALLED HER MISS FABULOUS, although her real name was Miss Fabaldon, because when she checked your writing or listened to your reading, she would touch you on the shoulder and say, Those are fabulous kicking kings you've written today, Nzuzo....

Practice.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... I KISS THE RING OF MY LATE MOTHER-IN-LAW when I need help with her difficult son--when he paces the house at night shouting at the rats that aren't there, or panics, fearful that the floor is falling in, that the roof is blowing off, that the...

With Dreams upon My Bed.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... With Dreams upon My Bed in memoriam John Berryman (1914-1972) Thou scarest me and affrightest me with Visions: the black iridescence like a trout-crowded stream leaping over and against itself, but soundless; a...

Rubbing Rock Against Rock I Made the Invisible Light Appear and That Saved Me Always.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Rubbing Rock Against Rock I Made the Invisible Light Appear and That Saved Me Always for RM Sick to a man, olive skinned and pickled from the season's chemistry: the root of hero refined to a mainline fix. We...

Once removed.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... MY WIFE AND SON DIED ONE YEAR AGO in a boating accident on the Schuylkill River. I wasn't there when they drowned, yet I have a vivid memory of what happened that day in my absence. Mornings, when I walk along the river bank, the dog happy...

Top of the World.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Top of the World That was the name desire gave the place-- the remote reality of a hill rising beyond others. It could be reached only by crossing a thick and pathless wood, hung with rusted warnings ...

Ditch.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Ditch On the day she miscarried again, I was shoulder-high in a ditch crossed by her father's shadow, thinking here was the grave of our expectation for another child. Formless clay thrown over ...

A Poem about Lust That's Not about Sex.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... A Poem about Lust That's Not about Sex I have one scar. I scraped my foot against the reef. You know how it is when something so startles you into your life-- you forget you're anything but eyes or ears or mouth. It...

Greco.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Greco for M. J. and B. H. F. He'd loom in the lime-circled square of home, His arched body shadowing the plate That was shaped--it struck me even then-- Like the diamond sewn on Superman's cape, And we'd watch in awe...

Attention, please. Now.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH HIS STANCE. His stroke. The way he stepped out of the batter s box when his team ailed for runs, stepped out and just stood still, arms crossed, until the ump urged him back. He'd return to home plate, all right, but only...

Born Again.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Born Again When Stephen spoke out, his words hit hard ears. Silently dragged and stoned and dead. His dented flesh now on your name, Stephen. I read about it after you told me your mother saw Christ standing to...

Graffiti.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Graffiti Today I will not pass the proud words of a Czech boy, but stand and trace "Kream tart" on that public wall-- finger alive and blue-- like the house in Rajnagar last December: I watched an Indian...

Shocking, surprising snodgrass.(W. D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle and Life Studies)
September 22, 2006... ALMOST TWO DECADES AGO, when W. D. Snodgrass's last Selected Poems appeared, another poet told me how different she felt revisiting his Heart's Needle sequence after many years. Back in the 1960s, she said, those poems had shocked her--had...