TSR’s Lagniappe

It’s spring, and if I didn’t know it from the ongoing string of fabulous festivals in south Louisiana, where we return home at day’s end sunburned by eighty-seven degree heat (it’s early April!) in a Beckett landscape where not a shadow of shade is to be found, covered in that protective layer of sweat I’ve grown to embrace in my lifetime but which my four-year-old has not quite accepted yet, then I’d know it by the arrival of the new issue of The Southern Review.

The striking photograph of a swimmer’s back and gorgeous bald head with arms outstretched grabs hold and pulls me in. This photograph by Peter Kayafas is part of his Coney Island Waterdance series, from which eight additional images compose the issue’s insert. My husband first mentioned Peter’s work to me; he’d seen one of the Polar Bear Club prints on a friend’s wall in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. I went to Peter’s website ( http://www.peterkayafas.com/  )and was captivated, the various expressions and experiences of so many different people in this relatively small area of water seemed a perfect microcosm of how we move around in this world together, often unaware of the joy or trepidation of those right next to us. If only we’d reach out a hand.

I am so pleased with this issue because we are fortunate to have many wonderful writers who contributed to our pages. A longtime poet-hero of mine, David Antin, graciously sent us “white ravens black helicopters,” a talk piece he had performed originally at the Bowery Poetry Club,   (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.php#10-23-10) and in which he mentions both his mother and his wife, Elly, who readers familiar with Antin’s work will recognize. He talks about many things, including highly improbable events that are described in philosophical circles as “black swans,” but in Antin fashion, he trumps the idea by pointing out “few people have ever seen a black swan but nobody has ever seen a white raven,” and I suspect, as he did with Milton Berle’s line at the beginning of the poem, that he “didnt have any idea just how terrific a line that was.”

The rich lines of Christine Garren’s poem “The Conversation” open this issue: “He thought I was asleep in the sun, I was not.  I was lucid. / For a long time I watched his ship departing / until the flag at the stern vanished, eaten by the gray horizon.” Garren deftly paints a vivid scene strewn with “emptied halves of mollusk shells for the roof,” where the speaker and absent subject speak through “the ocean’s shell” she holds to her ear. There’s a quietness to Garren’s work that moved me unsuspectingly from the immediate feeling of, These are really nice poems, to, I really love and appreciate these poems more with every reading.

Maybe I’m feeling the desire for a bit of isolation after the exhilarating crush of people I encountered with the holidays and Mardi Gras and AWP in Chicago all on top of each other, but the sense of aloneless in Garren’s “rapture of the void” is appealing. And just as her speaker cups a shell to her ear to stay connected to the departed, Charles Rafferty’s speaker in “Golf Course Moon,” calls on his departed to “step to a south-facing window” to see the moon he is seeing, the moon whose light that once, as he says, “made your body milk and I drank it from the cup of my coat beneath you.” Such absolutely sublime images fill Rafferty’s work. I’m only saved from the disappointment of having no words left to read in his poem by knowing that there are three others that I get to read.

Joe Wilkins, who sometimes contributes poetry to our pages, but this time has provided us with an honest and touching essay, “All Apologies,” writes about his relationship in high school with a friend named Justin, whose troubled family life eventually pushed him out town. The essay brilliantly captures the complexity of this moment in adolescence while also seamlessly weaving in the contemporary details of the era, grounded in Kurt Cobain’s lyrics, the words of another troubled soul whose genius would come to a tragic, too-soon close.

And finally before I close this note, I’ll say how exciting it is for us at The Southern Review to have in our pages a play. Included in the issue is an excerpt from Tommy Nohilly’s award-winning drama Blood from a Stone about the fraught relationships within a working-class family in New Britain, Connecticut. While there’s the hint of influence of Shepard (I’ve been fortunate to read it in its entirety, and it will run at Profiles Theatre in Chicago this fall), the play is clearly in the hands of a highly skilled and thoughtful writer who has his own experiences to build on and stories to present.

Well, I’m writing this in the kitchen of our converted shotgun double, and it’s strangely and suddenly chilly with the fans on and the rain outside. It’s the coolest the weather has been for months. But it’s spring, and I know because I’m looking as my copy of The Southern Review. Enjoy the weather, whatever you may have. I’m just grateful to have this beautiful new issue to take outside and crack open on my stoop, letting the rain which has begun to fall harder still soothe my sunburned legs.

As I sit down, we’ve just sent the winter issue to the printer, and it is a cold day in south Louisiana, very different from the days when I first read the poems that now fill this volume. I distinctly recall the first time I read every poem in the issue. They are exceptional, and we feel so privileged to have them grace our pages: ranging from some of my longtime favorite writers, such as Charles Simic and Stephen Dunn; to writers I’ve come to know and have great affection for since beginning my work with the journal, among those many are Bob Hicok and Wendy Barker and Alan Feldman; to writers who are new to the journal and who have come to us serendipitously, including the young and stellar talents Anna Journey and Ryan Teitman.

While the themes covered in the issue are diverse, the one that occupies me now (perhaps because of the holidays) is love—that which is long held and revived as well as that which is new; but also that which is lost or was never had in the first place; and, in between, that which is in a state of change, as love always is.

I had asked Stephen Dunn to send poetry to the journal, and, to my great pleasure, he did. “Anniversary Poem” arrived on my desk, coincidentally, on my anniversary. The poem opens, “Remember that day in the rain,” and then unfolds in its telling, “it’s raining again,” and the recognition that “it’s the body, I realize,/ that stores memory/ and sends it, when keyed,/ to those long-unvisited/ regions of the brain…” In that moment of looking back on the history of a relationship, Dunn reveals what we come to know about love and its “hundred connections happening at once”—that only retrospection can provide us with the knowledge that “long before I said I do/ I was saying I will and Let’s.” What a tribute to love and its endurance, which should never be taken for granted.

A professional acquaintance passed along to me the work of Anna Journey, an emerging writer new to The Southern Review, but who is quickly gaining the well-deserved attention of the poetry world. She adeptly uses the line and image to unveil tales of childhood, folklore, mystery, marriage, and family. In “Black Porcelain French Telephone,” the speaker addresses her husband whose mother has just died and with whom she attends a family gathering at his deceased mother’s house. She begins, “Your hoarder aunt took a truckload of angels,/ stone frogs, velvet chairs, even the ivory baby/ grand piano…” In the search for his unknown father whose identity his mother never revealed, her husband takes an antique telephone from the house, “Although we didn’t need another telephone… so you might finally reach the right number.” One night she finds him alone with his ear “cupped to the receiver” and notes, “I thought you moved your lips/ to speak, even though the phone jack was empty,” ending the poem on a crushing and beautiful image of her new husband alone in the dark, still searching for answers he will never find, feeling an emptiness that will never be filled, despite the new love he has in his life.

I was waiting for a front-end alignment on my convertible that I haven’t driven with the top down in almost four years since having my daughter, who is always with me when I am in the car. The shop TV was blaring some daytime talk show while I was making my way through a pile of manuscripts. I opened an envelope from Anemone Beaulier, whose poem overpowered the TV. “The Airy World” starts, “You’ve begun to breathe, brimming your lungs/ with my small sea,” and in nine brief lines she moves from the excitement of realizing she is growing a baby inside of her to the bittersweet recognition of motherhood, that “With each false breath, you are drifting closer/ to the airy world, this place where we’ll touch/ but forever be parted, and parting.” Maybe I wouldn’t have had the same connection to this poem five years ago, but surely I would have seen its beauty nonetheless, as I’m sure any reader will.

There is so much great work to write about in this issue, and every writer stands out as special for a different reason. For me, these three writers are particularly on my mind today. Tomorrow, three others will occupy my thoughts. All of them are inspiring and moving and, lucky for us, in our pages for everyone to enjoy.