Betty Adcock - Spring 2008 Feature

THE CORTLAND REVIEW

BETTY ADCOCK - POETRY - SPRING 2008 FEATURE

FEATURE
	Debra Allbery
		"The Third Image": Constellations of Correspondence in Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Simic, an essay on ekphrastic poetry and the notion of poetry and painting as "the sister arts."

	Debra Allbery
		Three ekphrastic poems: "Courbet," "No Tutor but the North," and "How to Explain a Dead Hare."
	POETRY
		Betty Adcock Charles Coté Martyn Crucefix Burt Kimmelman Eric Pankey Michael Salcman Nicholas Samaras Jim Tilley Gloria Vando Eleanor Wilner
	Interview
		A Note on Fictional Truth, a Conversation with Ed Pavlić, by Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum.
	Book Review
		"A Change of Maps" by Carolyne Wright—Book Review, by David Rigsbee.

Betty Adcock

			Betty Adcock's sixth collection from LSU Press, Slantwise, appeared in March 2008. Her work has received the Poets' Prize, the North Carolina Medal for Literature, the Texas Institute of Letters Prize, two Pushcart Prizes and several fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. She lives in Raleigh, NC with her jazz musician husband Don and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Photography I

1880

Here they are handwritten in old light.
How precisely in that brown sun's script
they bend at the waist in lace and cream
ruffles, in wide hats and wind-lifted
ribbons, small flags stopped in their drift.

The tall cane fence runs alongside then.
The summerhouse slumbers in a corner
of this one square window into a century
vanished so long that another has opened
and closed its slow shutter since

this spring or summer (trees leafed and serving
the moment) was caught, held ghost
of my great-grandfather's deer park,
folly of a gentleman farmer, his ladies
haunting the half grown fawns

who put up their heads to be stroked—
pets, adored by the sun and the soft
hands of the women, a strict loveliness
in the confining. Everything's
here, clouds like smudges of smoke,

even smoke, small threads of it pulled
faintly from the unseen chimney
of one of the rough cabins culled
out of the frame, out of this iconography
addressed to the future. The women

are too small to have faces. They won't
look up to warn us, secreted
in their voluminous clothes, touched
by the era's sepia dew. That fence
holds
still
and the animal yet
cannot bolt.