Selected Poems

...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.