ISSUE SIX
February 1999

Joseph Stanton


THE CORTLAND REVIEW

INTERVIEWS
 
Henry Taylor

POETRY
 
Mark Bibbins
  Sharon Cumberland
  Philip Dacey
  Daniela Gioseffi
  Brent Goodman
  Mark Halperin
  Ben Howard
  Stellasue Lee
  Linda Lerner
  John McKernan
  DeWayne Rail
  David Rigsbee
  Peter Robinson
  Terry Savoie
 
Joseph Stanton
  Mary Winters

REVIEWS
 
David Grayson

TRANSLATIONS
 
Lloyd Schwartz

FICTION
 
Rosa Shand
  Daniela Gioseffi

Joseph Stanton Joseph Stanton is widely published as a poet and scholar. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry East, Harvard Review, New York Quarterly, and many other journals. His latest collection of poems is Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art (Time Being Books, 1999).  He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
Storm at Cedarmere    Read Along with the Author

    for W. C. Bryant


The sound swells and turns above Bryant's
autumnal home as rising winds flail
the trees, and pale-white mists shroud
upland steeps, turning gloom inside out,

hollowing clouds of bright such as Tom Cole
could color at the heights of Kaaterskill.
One bay window finds Bryant's pond a cold
bright stone of light in hands held out,

an offering to the slanting dark of rains
that won't end soon.  The other window sees
the harbor wanting to keep on gleaming
beyond all drumbeat melancholias,

over full with remaining alive,
giving Bryant delicate redeemings—
sweet, dangerous dreams of almost seaward—
held to his long island's vastness of Sound.





For Sinatra in the Wee Small Hours    Read Along with the Author


Look at yourself, you voice, so very glad
to be unhappy, though unrequited love's
a bore, and you've got it pretty bad,

and you can't get along without her,
no, not really very well, though you try
and try to be so glad to be unhappy

and smile long notes through a mood indigo,
your blues so cool, holding the smiling whiskey
of your aging vibrato, swirled in the glass

of unrelenting style, deep in a dream
of some sort of her we've all lost, too, with you
seeing all our losses, as if you were singing

somehow all our sorrows, every life we've
wept tearless in the wee small hours, mourning
with a smile and a last, long curl of smoke,    adrift.





Dark Birds of the World    Read Along with the Author


In Dublin
magpies screech, chevrons
of gray and black and white,
brandishing sharp-tail knives.

In Lund
there rattle
unkindly ravenings,
swarms of mismatched skies.

Huge crows haunt
Long Island oaks.
High cries recollect,
but I cannot make reply.

 

 

Joseph Stanton: Poetry
Copyright � 1999 The Cortland Review Issue SixThe Cortland Review