Sewanee Review – Summer 2003
Volume 111 Number 3
Summer 2003
Jeannine Hall Gailey
The Sewanee Review, for those of you not familiar, is one of the bastions, along with the Southern Review, of regional literary culture in the South and one of the reasons people talk about “Southern writers.” I always read the essays in the Sewanee Review with as much interest as the featured poetry and fiction because they stand out as vibrant and gripping.
The Sewanee Review, for those of you not familiar, is one of the bastions, along with the Southern Review, of regional literary culture in the South and one of the reasons people talk about “Southern writers.” I always read the essays in the Sewanee Review with as much interest as the featured poetry and fiction because they stand out as vibrant and gripping. This issue is no exception, with lively essays on the poetry and lives of poets John Berryman (“Speaking in Tongues: John Berryman and the Lure of Obscurity” by Stephen Minot) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (“Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Literary Phenomenon” by Benjamin Griffith). While the work here is, for the most part, fairly traditional (which is not to insult, but merely an observation), I thought the short prose piece “Letter from Persephone” by Marisa Bulgheroni was particularly inventive. I also enjoyed the poem by Baron Wormser called “Inspections,” about children watching their mother clean the kitchen with obsessive vigor. [The Sewanee Review, 735 University Avenue, Sewanee, Tennessee 37383-1000. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $8. http://www.sewanee.edu/sreview/home.html] – JHG