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COPYRIGHT 2003 www.wmich.edu/compdr
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 251. $39.95 casebound.
An arrogant academic skeptical of all press blurbs, I must confess that the "unique and engaging collection" enticement for this volume pre-empted my own lofty pronouncement. Over- and misused though the first adjective may be, there is indeed something of the unique here: perhaps the serendipitous yet impressive range of essays and authors, perhaps their suspect (again to an academic) yet compelling readability, perhaps the casual yet substantive tone of the afterward. These distinctions are attributable, of course, to the book's origins in a symposium, only the second of the Alabama Symposia on English and American Literature to honor a single author. The first honoree being Shakespeare, the organizers' choice of Tennessee Williams obviously stemmed from more than the proximity of Columbus, Mississippi, his birthplace, to Tuscaloosa. A profound devotion to this twentieth-century playwright/poet seems to have been the impetus, a devotion contagiously conveyed by the participants as well.
This offspring of the symposium so merits the publishers' second adjective "engaging" that a reviewer's disengagement becomes impossible, my quibbles becoming increasingly with myself for not attending the symposium than with the inevitable weak points of the collection. Who can not be disarmed by an editor who yields his opening act to a poem by one of his contributors? Philip Kolin's "A Party at Tennessee's," while unashamedly more birdlike than bardlike, conjures a whimsical gathering of Williams's fictional flock in his French Quarter courtyard and evokes the magic of the title and of the epigraphs of Ralph Voss's admirably displaced introduction. Evocative...
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