Recently received the latest issue of Southern Poetry Review. Some wonderful stuff. The cover photo is wonderfully evocative, as was the one on the last issue. I was immediately taken with Anne Pierson Wiese’s “Due North,” an honest and simple character study (appropriate for the honest and simple character portrayed) untainted by excess sentimentality or disconnected irony. The language is a bit talky, I admit, and does nothing in poetic form that it couldn’t do in prose form. But the aphoristic delivery of “It’s long been known that redundant / information, if delivered in novel form, is welcome.” Well, isn’t that what poetry is all about? (It’s hard to get the news from poems….) And I love the vivid presentation of driving “down white / gravel roads blinding as sun that gave off great ghosts / of dust as we passed.”

I also enjoyed George David Clark’s “Update to the Old Encyclopedias,” a poem with a formal rhyme scheme that likens the decline and fall of the speaker’s parents to the decline and fall of great empires. What’s not to love about a poem that successfully rhymes “Napoleon” with “simoleons” (as in dollars?)

Maura Stanton’s foray onto the rooftop of a cathedral in Galicia is recounted in “Las Cubiertas.” Interesting rhyme scheme: abba cddcc, sort of a variation of the Spenserian stanza. She doesn’t stick to it religiously (forgive the pun)—and on the one hand, I think a poet needn’t be too dogmatic, in terms of rhyme, but then again, I wonder whether the poet gave up too easily.

Still gothic—but of the Southern gothic type—is Craig van Rooyen’s “Faith Healer.” Powerful language in the service of imagery, as in “the choir, swaying like / cobras in their robes.” Wow, where’d the snakes come from (reminiscent of those rattlesnake-kissing cult/churches, or a sly nod toward the garden of Eden?)? I also love how the traveling-circus/church, set up on a movie theater (religion as spectacle, as commercial entertainment?) becomes “infused with the popcorn / scented prayers of the jobless and the fat.” Of course, the poet takes a risk in including an allusion to “The Andy Griffith Show”—has the younger generation even seen a black-and-white TV show?—but it wasn’t lost on me, at least. And van Rooyen really nailed the ending:

Martha Zweig’s “By Way of Illustration” also caught my attention. I’ve read her work in the past, and have always been awed by the play of sound and words—in fact, it often seems that the words themselves are on some level irrelevant, selected only for the sounds that stack up and reverberate on the page. This poem shares that trait, though ultimately, it did not impress me as much as some of her other poems.

All four seasons, I believe, are represented in this issue. Another favorite shows a Winter scene: “Plowing,” by Brittany Perham. I love how the description of “the sliplace / of crusted pasture” evokes a covering of snow as sheened and satiny as a slip, and how “someone’s spring-stacked heap of burn wood” seems so much more appropriate than “firewood,” which is hard to say without imagining a cozy fire in the hearth—an image that would undermine the pale and chill that dominates the scene portrayed. I also love how the brothers undershirt echos the sliplace (assuming I’m reading that word correctly), further accentuating the wide whiteness of the scene.

Paul Martin’s “The Flood Baby” also held my attention. A simple rendering, just two sentences long, that captures the devastation of a flood and the subsequent hopeful (and doomed?) rebuilding through the detail of a child who pulls a doll from the storm debris. The details are vivid, but not so extraordinary as to draw attention from the narrative. Too much linguistic fervor would certainly have undermined the final lines, which describe the doll’s “ashen face, / the wide, still terrified eyes.”

I also reread Neil Shepard’s “March Myth” several times, each time rewarded by new connections and insinuations. It’s not quite clear to me wether the speaker is the baby, or another child in the house, or even if the perspective is that of a child. The poem starts on a blue note, literally, with “Postpartum blues / and Parker’s ‘Embraceable You.'” March is of course the end of Winter, so it’s physically true when Shepard writes, “The snow’s growing old.” But the snow immediately takes on greater connotation, speaking “an idiom peculiar to itself: crust / rust dust just us. Like the snow, we are all aging into dust. And I love the unexpected (perhaps even unintentional) interconnections: one stanze has the word “world” twice, so it’s hard not to misread “word” in the next stanza as a third “world.” And we also go from “a cradle to rock” in one hand to a baby “on a roll” in another. Rock and roll? Well, we do have Charlie Parker. But the sense of longing for the mother is palpable, especially as she wraps her arms around herself and dances alone in the kitchen. And while I’m not familiar with the Parker version of “Embraceable You,” I know the lyrics of the Gershwin original, which croons, “above all, I want my arms about you,” so it’s even more bittersweet as the poem concludes with the mother “opening her arms” (but for who, if anyone?).

Lots of charms in this latest issue of SPR, and I love them all.