“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
“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."
