Magazine Review: Water~Stone Review Volume 9: What Prevails edited by Mary Francois Rockcastle
It is time again to look at Hamline University’s annual literary magazine. This issue is from 2006. It’s dedicated to Frederick Busch, author of Girls, who had visited the university shortly before his death the previous year. The subtitle, borrowed from one of the poems within, refers to moments of hope among hardship.
After the usual introduction, the magazine opens with “Models of Passion and Pain” by Eleanor Lerman. It’s a poem–I’ve mentioned before I don’t “get” modern poetry–which seems to be about watching the sky in the moment before some great change is about to occur, one that is perhaps ominous.
“Knowing and Not: On the Poetry of Mind” by Stan Samuel Rubin closes the issue with a review of several poetry books that he claims challenge the intellect, as opposed to the majority of current poets who aim for entertainment. Due to my own limitations in this field, I can’t say that the fragments he quotes are any more baffling or demanding of intelligence than, say, the poems that dominate this very magazine issue.
In between there’s fiction, the best of which is “The Feast of the Circumcision” by Lon Otto, about a man taking his elderly father for a medically indicated circumcision procedure. There’s a certain amount of glumness to the story, but it ends with a bit of humor.
Lots and lots of poetry…would it kill poets to have rhyme and meter and discernable plot/characters? I’ll just mention “The Transmigration of Souls” by Agi Mishol (translated from the Hebrew) which is recognizably musings on the idea of reincarnation.
There’s some “creative non-fiction” as well, essays and memoirs. Best in this volume include “A Childhood Discovery” by Kao Kalia Yang, about growing up Hmong in America, “Hieroglyph” by Marc Conklin, a heartbreaking story of miscarriage, and “An International Incident” by Patricia Hampl, about a naive young woman’s first encounter with the Palestinian question in the form of a Palestinian student in Czechoslovakia at the end of the Vietnam War. This last also won a Meridel le Sueur Essay prize.
There’s three interviews, including one with Frederick Busch on his visit to Hamline. And book reviews: “No Easy Urn for Lafcadio Hearn” by A Bookworm is less a review than a biographical sketch of the author of Kwaidan, but is still fun to read.
There’s also some color photographs, which are the visual equivalent of the modern poetry–the most striking was “My Father’s Deathbed” by Patrick Kelley which shows a blue work uniform spread out on a wrinkled bed.
I am thinking that perhaps I should give up on literary magazines, given the poetry thing. But they do give me a nice contrast to the sort of thing I usually read.
