Article
Rain
When rain falls the crows shut their eyes and colors fade. They open them again in the darkness of their own wings. I stand at an intersection and let the headlights graze across my face. Leaves sink into sidewalks. Stores close, flags come down, but a warm wind rises through the grates. I want it…
Six Mile Mountain by Richard Tillinghast
Richard Tillinghast, Six Mile Mountain, poems: Clearly influenced by the Irish tradition, the enchanting poems in Tillinghast’s seventh full-length collection are rooted in landscape, and explore love, travel, chaos, and betrayal. (Story Line)
Introduction
I was very casual about the way I chose poems for this issue of Ploughshares. I asked a few friends — those I happened to be in touch with — for recent unpublished work. I picked what I wanted. Then I went through poems that had come directly to Ploughshares and which the editors thought…
The Heartsong of Charging Elk by James Welch
James Welch, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, a novel: Welch delivers a stirring, bravura tale-based on a true incident-of a Lakota Indian trapped in late-nineteenth-century France after being left behind by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. (Doubleday)
Introduction
It had been twenty years since I’d taken a turn in the editorial trenches, so the invitation to return to Ploughshares for one of its anniversary issues seemed an irresistible symmetry, a chance to observe directly some of the changes in the magazine and perhaps, by extension, in American poetry. Three differences are clear. First,…