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 Receipts 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.