Selected Poems , livre ebook
185
pages
English
Ebooks
2005
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185
pages
English
Ebooks
2005
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
25 juillet 2005
EAN13
9780822387008
Langue
English
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.
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Publié par
Date de parution
25 juillet 2005
EAN13
9780822387008
Langue
English
S E L E C T E D
James Applewhite
P O E M S
Duke University Press Durham & London
© Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by CH Westmoreland Typeset in Bembo by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, which provided funds toward the production of this book.
Contents
On the Selection ix
State Road My Grandfather’s Funeral Driving through a Country America The Sunplane Leaf Mirrors William Blackburn, Riding Westward Looking for a Home in the South Discardings Visit with Artina A Kid at the County Fair Revisitings Zeppelin Fantasy Bordering Manuscript To Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in Exile War Summer A Southern Elegy
The Capsized Boat On the Homefront A Vigil A Garden’s Season Iron River With Darkening Foliage Diamond of Shadow A Forge of Words Combat Station To Forgive this Inheritance Images, Burning A Minister, Crippled
vi
Keeper of the Dragon’s Teeth Boundary Stones
Tobacco Men Drinking Music Building in the Country Roadside Notes in Ragged Hand Water Blood Ties: For Jan Pamlico River January Farmhouse White Lake Firewood Some Words for Fall From as Far Away as Dying The Mary Tapes
Iron Age Flying English Church Towers Evening in Bath Royal Hospital Beginning with Egypt (The British Museum) Foreseeing the Journey
Jonquils Collards A Leaf of Tobacco Barbecue Service Southern Voices
The Morning After Greene County Pastoral Quitting Time How to Fix a Pig (as told by Dee Grimes) The Advisors
World’s Shoulder, Turning The Ford Crossing on Cables Constructing the River Just Rain Tree of Babel Clear Winter Like a Body in the River The Sense of Light When the Night Falls In Sight of the Self Buzzard’s Roost An Orphaned Voice House of Seasons The Water-Machine The Sex of Divinity Light Beyond Thought Out of My Circle Prayer for My Son The Bison Bridge Back Toward the South Driving Toward Cairo Rivers The Self, that Dark Star Sleeping with Stars and Bulbs, Time and Its Signs
vii
viii
The War Against Nature The Student Pilot Sleeps Lessons in Soaring Art and the Garden The Failure of Southern Representation A Place and a Voice Greenhouse Effect The Descent A Conversation
Storm in the Briar Patch Home Team A Wilson County Farmer Time at Seven Springs: An Elegy AfterWinslow Homer’s Images of Blacks The Cemetery Next to Contentnea A Father and Son Light’s Praise
A Voice at the River Park Botanical Garden: The Coastal Plains Autumnal Equinox Letter to My Wife, from Minnesota A Tapestry in a Mirror in the Palazzo Pamphili Sailing the Inlet A Distant Father Interstate Highway Grandfather Wordsworth
On the Selection
Selected Poemsis divided into nine sections, which reflect the chronology of the nine published books. I have rearranged some of the material to represent the original contour of the earlier work. In the s, my writing was often prompted by an occasion, a chance encounter while on foot or driving—or by a significant event, such as the death of a beloved figure, as in ‘‘William Black-burn, Riding Westward.’’ Sometimes the encounter was simply with a thought in relation to a landscape, as in ‘‘Bordering Manuscript,’’ written (pretty much as it is printed here) while in my car near the Law School of Duke University, after a walk across campus. I was also at work on a long poem using certain ob-sessively recurring memories of growing up in a small town in eastern North Carolina, in relation to tensions induced by the Vietnam war. This poem, ‘‘The War with My Father,’’ engaged spiritual fatherhood, male identity models, and images of warfare, but never fully developed a language for mediating between the past and that present. My feelings respecting male leadership in our culture, the divisions be-tween spirituality and violence, projected themselves backward, into recollec-tions of World War II versus the Christian quietism I had known, growing up in a Methodist household, son of a minister’s daughter, with a pious grand-father and one maternal uncle a minister. I considered including the whole of ‘‘The War with My Father’’ as an appendix. But I wanted this volume to be based on published poems. Many memory-passages from the long poemhad been published, as the last section ofStatues of the Grass(University of Georgia Press, ). Some also appeared in later books. The occasion-prompted poems of the early s made up most ofStatues of the Grass, and are now represented in section I ofSelected Poems. Section II puts back together, in their original se-quence, all of the passages taken from ‘‘The War with My Father,’’ which were published as individual poems. Section III is selected fromFollowing Gravity(University Press of Virginia, ). Donald Justice, judge of the Associated Writing Programs contest I had won, persuaded me to delete a group of poems I had written in England, while on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The manuscript of those poems remained in my imagination, and I present it here, as section IV. It is completed by a few poems written later and published inForeseeing the Journey(LSU Press, ). It would have been simpler to have selected each section from a single pub-lished book. But I have taken this opportunity to clarify issues—for myself, and hopefully for my readers—that were implicit in my first publications. In the first book, there was a certain vision, and a simple, direct way of putting it
