Current Issue

Stitching and Unstitching Poetry                                          winter 2012

After our exciting 2011 debut, “Idioms of Poetry,” we couldn’t resist kicking off 2012 with another issue devoted to verse: Stitching and Unstitching Poetry. We have Henry Hart on Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Michael Mott on Louis MacNeice, George Bornstein on Yeats's poetry of aging, Robert Buffington on Allen Tate's "great seizure of poems," Russell Fraser on Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Ann E. Berthoff on Kathleen Raine (one of Andrew Lytle's favorite poets), Christopher McDonough on Ovid, Dawn Potter on the art of writing (or struggling to write) poems, and, last but not least, Robert Lacy on country music (it's poetry, right?).  

        
           Slim needles shiver, caked with ice as
           Sharp winds bite like bitter teeth, this year
           Of grief, so many deaths, and I, myself,
           No longer young. Can vanity be all there is?
                         —Sarah Rossiter, "Light and Ice"

We have reviews of books by R. H. Dillard, Louis MacNeice, and Jack Ridl, in addition to reviews of books on William Carlos Williams, William Blake, and the spiritual in poetry. Two Aiken Taylor Award winners are also highlighted: David Yezzi captures the vision of Louis Glück, and John A. Murray remembers the late John Haines. Casey Clabough adds a remembrance of George Garrett, a longtime friend and contributor of the Sewanee Review. William Engel takes out his opera glasses to examine J. D. McClatchy’s recent translations of seven Mozart librettos, and Donald Stone (our occasional art critic) begins his review with "No British artist aside from Shakespeare has served so eloquently as England's cultural ambassador than J. M. W. Turner." Poetry? We've got it! This issue may go down (or up) as having the most poetry yet, with work by (just to name a few) Peg Boyers, Robert Cording, Ben Howard, Stephen Malin, Donald Junkins, Warren Leamon, and Sarah Rossiter, and Kathleen Wakefield. If you're interested in the current trends of the Shakesperean stage productions, Pamela Macfie's London theater chronicle is an insightful and helpful read. But the hidden gem in this issue is "Things Beyond Us," by Fred Chappell, a story fueled by the egomania of a poet and the lethargy of her consort.  


Eliot longed for something beyond the rank materialism that had grown instinct in the age.  He was like  Glück herself, finally and importantly a spiritual poet, who looked beyond the brute facts of our physical existence for the foundations on which to build transcendent meaning.
—David Yezzi,
"Cassandra at the Evening Window: Louise Glück's Dark Visions"