Mistress Mississippi
Volume Three of A Mississippi Trilogy
Hardback and Paperback: 125 pp.
Published: 1992
Price: $18.95, $12.50
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In the concluding volume of Louis Daniel Brodsky's narrative trilogy about a Northerner's personal odyssey in Faulkner's Mississippi, the hypocrisy and bigotry of small-town Oxford, with its commercialization of Faulkner, exacerbate the main character's disillusion, a malaise that ultimately leads to his moral and spiritual degradation.
Praise:
Louis D. Brodsky always works in improbable and daring ways. The narrator of this striking monologue . . . metaphorically transforms the State of Mississippi into "Mistress Mississippi," the image incarnate of his illusions and delusions of desire.
— Lewis P. Simpson, author of Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Literature
The poems in which Brodsky tells his reader and himself about this special world are lively and spirited and quite realistic.
— Cleanth Brooks, author of William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country
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In Defense of Physical Manifestations
From love's extremities,
Where each distinct edge of its antipodes
Rubs noiselessly against eternity,
We rush toward Oxford,
Our passions cyclones converging urgently,
Locomotives closing, on the same track.
The location of our fated clandestination
Has neither latitude nor azimuth
But rather is measured in fiery degrees,
Whose mutual habitations vary
Coincident with the erratic beat
Our sympathetic imaginations generate
Each time either of us contemplates trysting.
Such sweet release is both rhyme
And divine reason for this distanced longing
You, mistress, and I, your heart's bard,
Conceive as strophe, caesura, and closure
Whenever we sing the universe awake.
Soon, we'll blend our voices again,
In seminal remembrance,
And harmonize all verses deleted from Genesis
(An orgasmic catechism), hoping poetry,
The body's metaphysical apotheosis,
Will recovenant us with God.
