Article

Household

Here came Nathalie: forty-one, agile of body, angular of face, with large blue eyes under a flap of greying bangs, dressed at the moment in a woolen bathrobe with threadbare piping, she was carrying her firstborn baby, a daughter, down the upstairs hallway for an early morning nursing. There were paint buckets to be skirted,…

In The Dark Our Story

           is still unwinding. It’s 1919, the train’s dropped us in the Panhandle. This landscape is only for the Farmer’s pleasure. We’re stick figures, black things moving in a sunlit picture; how we love is our only secret. The Farmer watches me hour on hour from his velvet chair beside the field. You say it’s…

Words and Music

Words set to music, words that are sung, are not pleasing to the most refined connoisseurs of the art of sound. Among those who still tolerate them, many prefer choral works in which the word disappears; others want to hear only the sonorous arabesque of the voice (without being able to make out a single…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Alan Williamson Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS STEVEN ABLON is a psychoanalyst, and is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School. This is his first publication as a poet since college. PAUL BRESLIN teaches at Northwestern University. His poems have appeared in Poetry,…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Dan Wakefield Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS BROCK BROWER'S Mischief Night will be published next spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His other works include The Late Great Creature, a novel, and Other Loyalties, a collection of journalism. SUSAN ENGBERG'S stories have appeared in…

1930

Because the shadows are sepia all the little precisions seem soft, a quaking of leaves that extend their tenuous web We imagine it gold because it is August there is Marjorie       there is Ian eyes averted, modestly, so great is their pleasure in each other And you see his bare arm, exactly as graceful…

Letters from Ireland

October 28, 1980 Dear Gail, Caroline and Pete, I am finally in residence at No. 8 Brighton Vale, having been in the meantime in Scotland, namely Glasgow and the Lochs, Belfast, and Dun Laoghaire for an uneasy five weeks while waiting to get finally into this beautiful pink house, pink like the powder on an…

John Williams: Plain Writer

" plain (plan) adj. 1. clear or distinct to the eye or ear: persons in plain sight. 2. clear to the mind; evident, manifest, or obvious: to make one's meaning plain. 3. conveying the meaning clearly or simply; easily understood: plain talk. 4. downright; sheer: plain folly. 5. free from ambiguity or evasion; candid, outspoken….