Product Description

James Applewhite has produced nine extraordinary books of poetry. This volume is the first anthology of his remarkable oeuvre. It brings together chronologically arranged selections from all of his previous books, from the first, published in 1975, through the most recent, published in 2002. Applewhite’s poetry is deeply rooted in the history and rhythms of rural North Carolina, where he was born and raised, and these poems mark stages in an artistic and personal journey he has undertaken over the past thirty years.

In impeccable and surprising language, Applewhite depicts the social conventions, changes, frictions, and continuities of small southern towns. He celebrates that which he values as decent and life-enhancing, and his veneration is perhaps most apparent in his response to the natural world, to the rivers and trees and flowers. Yet Applewhite’s love for his native land is not straightforward. His verse chronicles his conflicted feelings for the region that gave him the initial, evocative language of place and immersed him in a blazing sensory world while it also bequeathed the distortions, denials, and prejudices that make it so painful a labyrinth. Rendering troubled legacies as well as profound decency, Applewhite reveals the universally human in a distinctively local voice, within dramatic and mundane moments of hope and sorrow and faith.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1925494 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

Review
"The South still contains the scenes James Applewhite has observed and brings here into rich focus and perspective." -- Leah Hughes, Southern Arts Journal

"When reading [Selected Poems], it isn't difficult to feel as if we are in the hands of a . . . trusted guide." -- Daniel Anderson, Duke Magazine

From the Publisher
"James Applewhite writes of his childhood and later life in rural North Carolina (‘places not much in anyone’s thoughts’) in language whose timeless gravity and sweetness are close to sublime. An essential book."—John Ashbery

"James Applewhite has individuated a logical and meditative voice all his own. I cannot think of more than a few living American poets who fuse so remarkably intellect and emotion."—Harold Bloom

"James Applewhite and Seamus Heaney are the same kind of talents and Applewhite’s Selected Poems suggests accomplishment worthy of comparison. It is rugged and refined, classical in decorum and local in idiom, deep in wisdom and clear as water in freshness. It is a compact, luminous etching of a singular imagination working to get down the way it was and is in this place on the planet."—Dave Smith

From the Back Cover
“James Applewhite writes of his childhood and later life in rural North Carolina (‘places not much in anyone’s thoughts’) in language whose timeless gravity and sweetness are close to sublime. An essential book.”—John Ashbery

Customer Reviews

Poets Should Be Immortal...
...or their poems at least should stay in print long enough to be discovered on the shelves in the narrowest corner of the bookshop, long enough to be recommended to friends. James Applewhite is a man in his seventies now. He's spent most of his life teaching at Duke and writing a goodly sheaf of poems, a few of which have been selected here from his many out-of-print volumes. I first encountered him as a personage interviewed in V.S. Naipaul's insightful travel book, A Turn in the South. He's a consciously "southern" poet, deeply rooted to place, to the archaeology of his own culture's past - tobacco farms, fruit orchards, country stores, people in the grain of vanishing rural life. As the world "we" know from the media has departed from that life, Applewhite has come to seem a poet of nostalgia, but that wasn't his starting point. Instead, he was a poet who celebrated the beauty of things around him, ordinary things and things that are uttery extraordinary when seen by a poet. Some readers might feel a similarity in Applewhite's poems to the novels of Wendell Berry, also a lover of old roads and well-tilled relationships.

Here's an Applewhite poem - shorter than most but typical in its evocative specificity:

TRIBUTARY BRANCHES
The wires hung taut along country roads,
their poles canted, the creosote color of rivers.
Would a time ever come to assemble a consciousness
of a life which had never known itself? The fragments
that haunted him - faces in albums, maps showing
routes of steamboats - collided with chromium images,
airliners fragmented among toothpaste and pantyhose,
in a mirroring quicksilver shot electronically
through the domed, dumb mind from horizon to horizon
over fields: a simultaneous, unbelieved moment,
so that the reality eluded perception. Stories were
forgotten, this new time carried in the air,
disguising the trees of genetic coding, of relatives
scattered among the tributary branches of the Neuse,
cousins and uncles along Contentnea, Toisnot, relatives
by marriage in Grifton, Ayden, Shelmerdine.

Applewhite the man must be everything I am not: conservative, fixed on his mythic South, hostile to urbanity and technological 'progress', deeply religious even if not easily faithful, courtly in manner, somewhat taciturn. It's a tribute to his poetic sensibilities that I can find his work deeply touching and beautiful.