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Seas and Inland Journeys: Landscape and Consciousness from Wordsworth to Roethke

James Applewhite
Selected Poems

James Applewhite

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.
Daytime and Starlight: Poems

James Applewhite

In this powerful collection, James Applewhite searches the world, from the back roads of his own American Southeast to the antiquities of Europe, for an expanded awareness of history. Time itself, these poems seem to say, is wholeness, the communion of generations, and it is in history, whether of the world, community, or our own families, that we find the locus of our common yearnings. Lucid, conversational, and utterly compelling, Daytime and Starlight presents through an array of perspectives the ephemera of memory - comic strips, love letters, newsreels, popular music, Greek and Roman statuary - and juxtaposes them with a flawless instinct for the telling detail against contemporary notions of evolution and cosmology. A half-remembered chiaroscuro of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach, the haunting familiarity of figures in a Renaissance tapestry, the vision of air "green with evening" - in such brief suspensions of time, love and beauty balance regret and loss. Time and again, in poem after poem, Applewhite strikes a clear, bell-like tone of affirmation: "We're all in this together."
A Diary of Altered Light: Poems

James Applewhite

"Applewhite has undertaken to capture, in the manner of Monet's serial paintings, the momentary registration of light on the world around-and on the world within as well, for light is also the poet's metaphor for meaning and understanding."-Kelly Cherry These poems record the partly predictable, partly random representative days in a year that inspire wonder at their swiftness. Seasonal time is reflected in the changing angle of sunlight, and familial time is marked by birthdays and holiday celebrations. Public events take on both a sense of history and a sense of unreality in the bright glare of media attention and shiny celebrity surfaces. All the various time-orders in which we live overlay one another: a red leaf adrift in a stream is emblematic of autumn's recurrence; after years of marriage, a couple's wedding suddenly seems very close. Spurred by the sensation of accelerating days at the turn of the new millennium, James Applewhite explores the interplay of immediate experience and lasting memory, of continuity and change, over time-that elusive, ineffable, yet crucial medium of self-definition and of understanding the cosmos.
Following Gravity: Poems (Virginia Commonwealth University series for contemporary poetry)

James Applewhite
Foreseeing the Journey

James Applewhite
Foreseeing the Journey: Poems

James Applewhite
History of the River

James Applewhite
Lessons in Soaring

James Applewhite
Ode to the Chinaberry Tree and Other Poems

James Applewhite
Quartet for 3 Voices: Poems

James Applewhite

James Applewhite integrates personal experience with his wide historical, literary, and scientific knowledge to trace the transformation from an older South to a new; from the segregated, small town world of his grandparents' chickenyard and garden to the contemporary reality of Stealth technology and the Oklahoma City bombing.
Applewhite's insights alternate between subtle and stark as he meditates on three interrelated themes: the World War II-era absent father; the legacy of racism; and the shift from an agrarian society to a technological one. Representing a lineage that includes slaveholders, tobacco farmers, and a great-grandfather wounded at Chancellorsville, he deconstructs racist mythologies and identifies the leading and misleading of the nation into military triumph, space flight, and tragedy by such problematic father figures as Henry Ford, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Wernher von Braun.
Applewhite also reimagines the flawed past as a basis for a more livable future-the restoration of a missing voice in the harmonizing of opposed elements in the South's historical consciousness. As described in the book's pivotal poem, "The Deed," after selling his father's farm, he lays to rest the guilt of inheritance and relocates "rootedness" to a home shared with his wife beside the Eno River in northern Durham County.
River Writing: An Eno Journal (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

James Applewhite

"River Writing is an extraordinary journal of a poet's intimate encounter with a landscape in which the self can temporarily abandon itself. In this setting, nature becomes a text, a language of past, present and future. Applewhite reads that text for us with enormous empathy and by ideal light." --Lisel Mueller "James Applewhite's River Writing: An Eno Journal seems to me one of the few authentic and strong American poetic sequences of his generation. Applewhite has found his true subject as a poet, and has developed a stance and style wholly adequate to the philosophical and spiritual reach of his poignant concerns." --Harold Bloom "These poems are the waves emanating from the gravitational fall of my runs by the Eno river," writes James Applewhite, "and other travels, into a self I could not otherwise know. They are my repetitive song of belief in the possibility of presence in language." From "Observing the Sun" On a bank overlooking the Eno, I feel us as lightly aligned As heads of the Queen Anne's lace, Their congregation of angles. Red sun, dilated, has us all In its sights. Against its horizon, I spread my arms like a road sign To mark earth where we are.