Selected Poems
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.
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James Applewhite's books of poetry include A Diary of Altered Light (forthcoming), Quartet for Three Voices (2002), Daytime and Starlight (1997), and A History of the River (1993). He has received numerous awards, including the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award in Poetry, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, and the North Carolina Award in Literature. Applewhite is Professor of English at Duke University, where he has taught since 1972.
"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
"James Applewhite's Selected Poems traces a world ranging from the rural landscape of his South with its cross-roads and tobacco to England's churches to the more universal subjects of time and children. . . . Perhaps the most compelling poems in this vein are two late ones in the collection, 'A Distant Father' and 'Interstate Highway.' In the second of these, a poem dedicated to Applewhite's daughter, traffic, here a collective figure for us all, moves over a landscape much as a river might, 'exiting and rejoining . . . so closely linked that, / if seen from above' it makes a 'stasis of lights, ' and 'the pattern we bead is constant.' Constancy, no small matter, characterizes James Applewhite's poetry."
--Wyatt Prunty "The Weekly Standard"
"Poet/critic Dave Smith has called Applewhite's work 'rugged and refined, classical in decorum and local in idiom, deep in wisdom and clear as water in freshness.' That clarity and freshness is made even more apparent as this volume presents Applewhite's poems in their intended order and logic."-- "American Poet"
"The publication of James Applewhite's Selected Poems is a signal event in the history of North Carolina literature. . . . [A] volume of uncommon consistency, a sort of spiritual autobiography less concerned with chronological circumstance than with recurrent themes, moods and motifs. . . . [M]y admiration has rarely dimmed in 50 years of study. When this poetry later gained the approval of such literary luminaries as Donald Justice, John Hollander, James Dickey and others, I did not need to feel vindicated. From the beginning, Applewhite's lines have borne the stamp of excellence, the signature of the genuine. Selected Poems is a landmark."
--Fred Chappell "News & Observer"
