Selected Poems
James Applewhite
Review by Leah Miranda Hughes

The scene: a rustic homestead in rural North Carolina on a winter morning. Everything--the porch swing, the shed door, the tattered garden with its hollyhock stakes and abandoned stalks, the bare oak and maple trees--stands gray, silhouetted on the horizon as daybreak urges salmon and blue color into the still land.

James Applewhite was born into such a scene in 1935, and he uses his familiar landscape as both a beginning and an introduction to Selected Poems. Throughout the volume, the South bears moments that hold cultural language and ways and idiosyncrasies, but he also takes these issues—and others—beyond the South, seeking his relationship to the larger whole. It's all a journey. So perhaps Applewhite's first published piece, a poem titled "The Journey" in a 1966 Virginia Quarterly Review, foreshadowed the predominant movement of his work.

Selected Poems
James Applewhite
Duke University Press;
184 pages; 6 x 9 1/4;
Paperback, $18.95
ISBN 0-8223-3639-1

In Selected Poems, Applewhite doesn't present a comprehensive overview of his career, but a carefully contemplated edition of his nine published poetry collections. He clearly states his aim in the preface—that reflective selection might reveal the true "trajectory of form and voice" of his poetry. Each section, from 1975 to 2002, reflects the poet's métier: "I could assemble the jig-sawed chips in a lifetime." ("Bordering Manuscript").

Applewhite manages to turn common-place moments into monumental forks in the speaker's road, where the scene both reflects and speculates; a memory and a wish joined. A familiar hilltop in Section Two's "Diamond of Shadow" is refined over and over; and "Light's Praise," closing Section Eight, becomes a psalm to simple elements. He discovers and illuminates small glimpses of tobacco, a grave, North Carolina's Eno River, an autumn day, jonquils, an equinox, or a road until the everyday Southern transcends.

The preface offers the general disposition on his individual collections in terms of place and perspective so the nine sections--chronological stepping stones—allow the reader to travel from exploration to mastery. The sections demonstrate his love of long poems, his leaning toward narrative.Yet his forms—ballads and elegies, tributes and odes--ring richly and knowingly: In "Southern Voices" the poet/speaker asserts: "If you understand my accent,/You will know it is not out of ignorance."

Applewhite could be regarded a Southern poet by heritage and language, but toward the end of Selected Poems, he molds the South into standard forms with exquisite confidence, his once young speaker more confident on his quest for a role in the drama of history and setting. Evident and deliberate forms develop an ease, perhaps imitative of his model, William Wordsworth."A Voice at the River Park," the poem beginning Section Nine, illustrates this major theme, sketched by an accomplished hand:

A current slips by me and is gone,
yet the stream continues. We're
heirs of a past we sometimes
stumble on when we follow
the paths of forebears.

The human songs of death and love, religion and family closing the collection convey Applewhite's status as a notable in Southern literary history. Certainly, as an overall record of his poetic journey from rural to universal, from youth to experience, from land to cosmos, Selected Poems may be the poet's life narrative, his unique autobiography.

As a Southerner, I'm drawn to the center of the book, Section Five, where form and native language combine into beauty. The simple sonnet "Jonquils," the reverence given to "Collards," the imagery in "A Leaf of Tobacco," the tasty "Barbecue Service," the evocative "Greene County Pastoral," and the rich "clay of vowels" from "Southern Voices" will keep Applewhite close to my heart. The South still contains the scenes James Applewhite has observed and brings here into rich focus and perspective in this new collection.

Born and raised in Dalton, Georgia, poet Leah Hughes now lives and writes
in Atlanta. She's a 2004 graduate of the MFA program at Queens University
of Charlotte, North Carolina, and is currently completing her first poetry
collection, Shh...You're Scaring Me. As a Southerner, she finds inspiration in
the Appalachian foothills and her dachshund, Emily Dixieson.

Winter 2006 · Volume 2, Number 1 southernarts JOURNAL pp180-181