MARION MONTGOMERY was a poet, novelist, and critic who taught English at the University of Georgia for more than thirty years. His most recent books include
With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: In Company with Flannery O'Connor, T. S. Eliot, and Others, and
Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O'Connor, St. Thomas and the Limits of Art, as well as
On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964-2000.
In this volume, Marion Montgomery ponders two very different varieties of possum as the starting point for a literary, philosophical, and poetic inquiry into the nature of Southernness. The first possum is the familiar marsupial, native to the American South, in whose modest status can be seen an image of the lowly ground to which all our dreams must remain anchored. The second possum is the first-person singular present of the Latin verb posse; rendered as "I am able," this possum embodies the movement in which men, since the Old Adam, have elevated themselves beyond their estate, taking for themselves sole credit for the world they see around them.
Prescribing a way of thought by which men can regain the balance that modernity has led them to relinquish, Possum, and Other Receits for the Recovery of "Southern" Being posits a concept of Southernness that is a state of the soul rather than a result of geography, a Southernness in which man's mind and his moments of vision are kept in harmony with nature, with the reality of the world given to man.
Montgomery's book is well written. It is occasionally witty, often erudite, always engaging—and there's not a vague sentence in its pages. . . . Certainly Montgomery is right in asserting that Western Man's attitude toward Nature and his consequent attitude toward himself have infected the roots of Western being. . . . MontgomelCž
![Possum and Other Receipts for the Recovery of Southern Being [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/6/7/9/2_3877283.jpg "Possum and Other Receipts for the Recovery of Southern Being [Paperback]")