Selected Poems

“[A] substantial book from a poet too-often deemed 'southern,' somehow managing to be at once somber and lavish, a poet like Wordsworth of ideas advanced and developed as images.” - George Witte, Poetpeeve

“[T]hese poems demonstrate a genuine gift for figurative thinking and writing; often they provide extraordinary recastings of the extra ordinary. , , , In these portraits and meditations we see a poet who deserves acclaim not just across the South, but across the nation.” - Robert M. West, Southern Cultures

“Applewhite conveys an intimacy with land that’s increasingly rare in a culture of frequent flyer miles and truncated attention spans. People and place are so seamlessly entwined here that they know each other like longtime lovers, when ‘no words ... are enough.’ . . . Integrity of craft and compassion merge in what Applewhite terms his ‘seasoned diary.’” - Melanie Drane, Foreword Reviews

“For my money, Applewhite is one of the best poets around at capturing the grace and rhythms of the haunting Southern landscape. . . . Applewhite recently published a “best of” collection that captures the terrible beauty of the natural world and the timeless legacy of small Southern towns like no one else I’ve ever read. Make no mistake: Applewhite does not dally in provincial lullabies. He is a master of verse spinning lyrical lines about collard greens and tobacco leaves, and isn’t afraid to journey into the paradoxes and idiosyncrasies of the South, which, in turn, become metaphors for our own lives.” - Michael Beadle, Smoky Mountain News

“For those who enjoy narrative poems with familiar landmarks—rural North Carolina landmarks—these poems from nine collections over 30 years will delight.” - Dannye Romine Powell, Charlotte Observer

“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

“Perhaps because he has tried his hand at flying, or because he has long been an amateur student of astronomy, Applewhite’s poems . . . tend to lift off the earth and take the long, interplanetary or even intergalactic view of things. . . . Applewhite soars.” - Emily Grosholz, Hudson Review

“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 human songs of death and love, religion and family, closing the collection convey Applewhite's status as a notable in Southern literary history As a Southerner, I'm drawn to the center of the book, Section Five, where form and native language combine into beauty. . . . [I] 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." - Leah Hughes, Southern Arts Journal

"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

"When reading [Selected Poems], it isn't difficult to feel as if we are in the hands of a skilled and trusted guide. Applewhite's creative judgement in these poems is pretty much beyond reproach. [His] lovely, unassuming, and clarifying last lines are the kind poetry could use more of today." - Daniel Anderson, Duke Magazine

“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 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 writes of his childhood and later life in rural North Carolina (‘places not much in anyone’s thoughts’) in language whose timeless gravity and sweetness are close to sublime. An essential book.” - John Ashbery