‘Only such men could tell what once could be, Hear what we hear, see what we see.’ Donald Davidson, “Late Answer: A Civil War Seminar” The wind is all but silent in the pinesAround a glade whose light comes down from fire,Not filtered or aslant through needle, cone, A heightened brightness passing as it stays. And there, alone,…
David MiddletonJuly 24, 2020
Old slave and planter graves a flight apart For thrushes eating seeds of grass and yew, The unmarked plots and plots with dates and names Too weatherworn to trace and know in stone, Bones sinking toward a spring no well can reach, 600,000 dead for whom the War Has long since ended and will never end, The blue and gray…
David MiddletonSeptember 4, 2019
A review-essay on A Memory of Manaus: Poems by Catharine Savage Brosman. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2017. A Memory of Manaus, Catharine Brosman’s eleventh full-length collection of poetry, confirms her rightful place in the front rank of contemporary American poets. Working skillfully in both traditional forms and in tightly controlled free verse, Brosman is among that very small number…
David MiddletonFebruary 13, 2018
Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver, 1910-1963: A Life of the Mind. University of Missouri Press, 1995. 217; Joseph Scotchie, editor, The Vision of Richard Weaver. Transaction Publishers, 1995. Early in the fall of 1939, while driving over "the monotonous prairies of Texas" to begin a third dismal year at Texas A & M with its "rampant philistinism, abetted by…
David MiddletonDecember 18, 2017
Upon the Painting by Paul Davis of the Statue of a Young Confederate Soldier —on the cover of The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective (William Pratt, editor, 1965)— in honor of Clyde Wilson The cover holds us from the poems within, This young Confederate Davis captured here, A private guarding gates at two removes, This painting of a…
David MiddletonDecember 8, 2017
Goodbye, Dear How seldom now do you begin with Dear, Both warm and formal (civil) but a mere First name -- “David:” -- like a Sir or Madam Summons to a wayward child of Adam, No salutation as in Saint Paul’s Letters, Your curt tone saying one should know his betters As if you bid a servant or a…
David MiddletonMay 12, 2015
It filled the screen from midnight until dawn After the late show, anthem, station sign In those brief early days of innocence When television broadcast black and white. The pattern was rectangular, abstract, Made up of wheels and numbers, blocks and lines To measure shape, proportion, light and dark, Its soundtrack shrill – the sine wave’s monotone. But centered at…
David MiddletonOctober 31, 2014
St. John's Episcopal Church, Thibodaux, Louisiana Fenced off by iron and antebellum oaks These April graves grow fragrant in the sun. Sprung dandelions, puffballs, and buttercups Tremble against the fissured concrete urns Whose lichen-blotched worn bowls of measured earth Hold lilies bloomed and risen from the dead. And there where other tombs have sunken in Or tilted with the shiftings…
David MiddletonMay 16, 2014
on Driskill Hill, north Louisiana “Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall” Andrew Lytle, “The Hind Tit” I’ll Take My Stand (1930) for fellow southern poet Jim Kibler When daylight ends and silence minds the fields Of stars and corn, late summer’s bumper yields, I work, building a fiddle true and good, Wood shorn from…
David MiddletonApril 3, 2014
Recent Comments