Roth seems to me the most gifted novelist now writing, at least if one puts a stress on tradition in using the word novelist. He translates his intelligence and his feelings into the terms specific to serious fiction, with more firmness than Bellow, more richness than Mailer, more patience and steadiness and taste and tact…
Butch, determined to wait out the cold, took a stool near the end of the bar, away from the cluster of regulars gathered where they could see the Motorola TV. His back was only two feet from the front window. He could feel the cold seeping through the glass, hear the mean wind off Lake…
The leafless trees are feathery, A foxed, Victorian lace, Against a sky of milk-glass blue, Blank, washed-out, commonplace. Between them and my window Huge helices of snow Perform their savage, churning rites At seventeen below. The obscurity resembles A silken Chinese mist Wherein through caligraphic daubs Of artistry persist Pocked and volcanic gorges, Clenched and…
I too have favorite candidates for whatever literature of the 1970's ought to survive. The poems of Amon Liner and James Applewhite ought to last on, and Marguerite Yourcenar's novel The Abyss and Mary Lee Settle's Blood Tie, and the stories of Eve Shelnutt. I have no real confidence that these works will survive. Almost…
DUDE See I'd met this old dirt farmer in a bar the night before. Said he was selling his truck cheap and I could come down to La Rosa and pick it up. Said $300 and it didn't run too bad but I'd better buy it now. So I hitched down Sunday morning, mud churches…
for Joe and U. T. Summers Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class Of traveler, nor that rarified tax bracket, These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts Under our eaves, nesting in withered grass, Wormless but hopeful, and now their voice enacts Forsythian spring with primavernal racket. Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray Of…
The story my father tells me is like the music one wants to make himself, or hears inside himself and nowhere else, elusive, as anything which is always present. He is here, seated on a rattan chair over which he has spread a sheet so that the rough, woven reeds won't snag his suit, a…
I got over to the side of the road as far as I could, into the grass and the weeds, but my father steered the car over that way, too. Through the windshield I could see his work hat, the shadow of his face and shoulders, the specks of light that were his glasses. I…
for Allen Tate Through a loose camouflage Of maples bowing gravely to everyone In the neighborhood, and the soft, remote barrage Of waterfalls or whispers, a stippled sun Staggers about our garden, high On the clear morning wines of mid-July. Caught on a lifting tide Above a spill of doubloons…
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