Disappearing in Mississippi Latitudes
Volume Two of A Mississippi Trilogy
Hardback and Paperback: 121 pp.
Published: 1994
Price: $18.95, $12.50
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In the second volume of Louis Daniel Brodsky's narrative trilogy about a Northerner's personal odyssey in Faulkner's Mississippi, the main character leaves his Missouri home more and more frequently, for this cultural "oasis" and recognizes that marital discord is at the heart of his flights. Moreover, his original perceptions of the land and its people, based largely on his reading of Faulkner's novels, start to delude him.
Praise:
Brodsky's verse is steeped in the sensuous brew of the North Mississippi country, and the mixture of ingredients — what he finds there, what it tells him about himself — makes for memorable poems.
— Louis D. Rubin, Jr., founder of Algonquin Books and former editor of The Literary South
L.D. Brodsky's poetry offers a moving, insightful understanding of Mississippi worlds about which William Faulkner wrote. Brodsky's quest for Faulkner's world is a fascinating pilgrimage.
— William Ferris, former chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities
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Strangulation
Kudzu is a radical manifestation
My imagination can't eradicate
No matter how concentrated my gaze inward.
In every direction,
I see green-seething Piranesian chains,
Sense their impending threat
As I drive westerly out of Oxford,
Into a wet morning fog.
Suddenly, vision is engulfed, extinguished.
I strain to maintain the median
Between my eyes and brain.
By degrees, ubiquitous loblolly pine trees,
Embedded in red clay,
Absorb me, admit me into their keeping,
As though the kudzu were a freshly dug grave
Into which my spirit has
just descended.
