SHENANDOAH: The Washington and Lee University Review

(Billy Edd Wheeler / "Coon Creek Girls and Billy Edd"
(Rosie Foley and Lily Man Pennington; from a photograph by Warren Brunner)oil, 16" x 20", 2002)

SHENANDOAH is probably my favorite literary magazine. Its editor, R.T. Smith,is a friend from way, way back and one of the country's finest poets. He's also a fiction writer worth reading, too. The magazine always has his Editor's Note at the end, this issue's piece titled "Heart and Coal: An Appreciation." As Rod describes it, "It's about coal mining, songs about the people and specifically about Kathy Mattea's album Coal."



To read an interview with Rod Smith, go to http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuethree/rodandjohn3.htm



(R.T. SMITH)

This Spring/Summer issue is a reader's dream. How could it be otherwise with the lead-off story being one by Lee Smith? Maxine Kumin gives us an essay, "Swift to Its Close," and the list of poets ranges from Richard Foerster to Hanes Eason, with David Wagoner, Elton Glaser, James Malone Smith, and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, among others, in between. Yes, there are book reviews, too, and an interview with Dominica Radulescu by Sarah Kennedy, herself an outstanding poet. To see the entire table of contents, as well as read excerpts from earlier issues, go to www.shenandoah.wlu.edu.

After you visit the website, SUBSCRIBE. OUR LITERARY MAGAZINES NEED OUR SUPPORT.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick has long been a poet whose work I've admired; I'm happy to present her poem from this current issue, "After the Cave Paintings" below.




After the Cave Paintings

Why do I stand unmoved,
jaded as a tabloid, refusing
astonishment, not down on
my knees, but sober as stone—
surely 17th century spelunkers,
pranksters, or WWII resistance
fighters passing hours in the belly
of the mountain made these
bison, these bearded horses.

But carbon dating brings me
to my senses. Whatever I can’t take
in—1500 generations, 32,000 years—
here’s human memory on the horns
of an ibis, our ancestors making it up
from scratch.
Is it all too near
to where I’ve been? Birth & Death.
Back and forth across that stuttering
line, illness a long darkness with only
a lantern and my love’s strong
arm, the uneven, the unearthly
underfoot.

Stalactites make their own
sense of water and limestone
as I’m to make something wholly new
from the dripstone of another life.

Just as well we’re not as firmly
anchored as we think.
In the thinned air, the wavering light,
easier to find that other self, who knows
as the animal knows, as the bears
in these caves once knew, standing
upright on the old riverbed,
so daughters of Adam, sons of Eve,
took up what the bears laid down,
dark claw on limestone, and drew.

Kathryn teaches poetry, Irish Studies, and environmental literature at Appalachian State University. Her most recent book is Out of the Garden (Mayapple, 2007)