The Louisville Review – Fall 2010

Guest editors Philip F. Deaver (fiction), Nancy McCabe (nonfiction), and Kelly Moffett (poetry) join drama editor, Charlie Schulman, and Louisville Review editor Sena Jeter Naslund to offer up yet another notable issue. From accomplished poets Eleanor Wilner, Stephen Dunn, and Frederick Smock—among many others—to the surprising accomplishments of poems in the “Children’s Corner,” featuring work more polished and successful than one expects from high school students, this is a particularly appealing issue.

Guest editors Philip F. Deaver (fiction), Nancy McCabe (nonfiction), and Kelly Moffett (poetry) join drama editor, Charlie Schulman, and Louisville Review editor Sena Jeter Naslund to offer up yet another notable issue. From accomplished poets Eleanor Wilner, Stephen Dunn, and Frederick Smock—among many others—to the surprising accomplishments of poems in the “Children’s Corner,” featuring work more polished and successful than one expects from high school students, this is a particularly appealing issue.

Poetry is smart and smartly composed, tending toward the philosophical and metaphysical for the most part rather than narrative or incident-driven compositions, work that ponders large questions, including the meaning of large questions. Here are the opening lines of Eleanor Wilner’s “Of Words”:

English asks: What does it mean?
Italian asks: How does it want to be said.

I ask in the way of Italian, which gives to words desire,
how gray matter wants to be said.

I liked, in particular, “Contours” by the ever-lyrical Doug Ramspeck; translations from the Spanish of Uruguayan poet Líber Falco (1906-1955) by Laura Chalar; Michael T. Young’s “Honeybees” (“And when I read / that honeybees are dying in thousands, / an epidemic no one can explain, I wondered, / Have I forgotten something? Who am I now?”); and “Condition Blue,” by James Harmes: “For years, I tried / to make a blue building / in words.”

The work of three-dozen mature poets is accompanied by five short stories, five essays, four short dramatic works, and the poems of eight youth writers. Prose, for the most part, is personal and affable, familiar voices with readable stories, focused mainly on family stories. “Denying the Enemy Ground,” sudden fiction by Larry S. Williams, represents a departure from family-oriented material, a short Vietnam War story.

The four short plays were written for Theater Oobleck, a Chicago-based company that mounts new works (“Theater Oobleck Is: New Works; No Director: Free If You’re Broke”). Ensemble members write all the material they produce and perform. The company conducts open rehearsals, inviting feedback from the audience for potential incorporation into the works. The plays published here are quite different from each other, ranging from the nearly surreal in their linguistic impulses, to the casual language and tone of intimate storytelling: “Before I tell you of my bad day, for that is why I am here, to tell you of this bad day, I must first tell you of a very good day I had,” begins “Havel/Bickle” by David Isaacson.

My recommendation for a good day: read this issue of The Louisville Review.
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