Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
A MATCHED PAIR, FOR THE AGES a review by Michael White Betty Adcock. Rough Fugue. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. James Applewhite. Time Beginnings. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.
MICHAEL WHITE is a Creative Writing Professor at UNC Wilmington. He received his BA from the University of Missouri and his PhD from the University of Utah. He has published poetry and prose in multiple magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry. His collections include The Island (Copper Canyon, 1992), Palma Cathedral (UP of Colorado, 1998; reviewed in NCLR 1999), Re-entry (University of North Texas Press, 2006; reviewed in NCLR 2007), and Vermeer in Hell (Persea, 2014) and he has also published a memoir, Travels in Vermeer (Persea, 2015; reviewed in NCLR Online 2016).
Betty Adcock and James Applewhite are revered poets here in North Carolina, and each of their latest books (both from Louisiana State University Press) are grand-slams, written at the height of their distinct, yet equally staggering powers. These are artists who continue to improvise boldly, even after long and glorious careers, with all the wisdom and generosity of a life well-lived. And these are collections to read until the thumbcreased pages fall out. James Applewhite’s mind is in the sky; he wants us to join him there. Interested not only in “poetry painting dance and song,” which he writes in “Poet Briefly in Office,” but in philosophy and every science, what Applewhite’s reflective manner signifies is not disengagement or aloofness in his latest book of poetry, Time Beginnings. There is, rather, a genuine faith in the redemptive power of poetry, and he means to wield that power for good. His work aspires to the embodiment of consciousness in all its windings, insofar as it can be captured in the weir of meter, syntax, and syllable. If it seems I’m describing an epic poet of inwardness like Wordsworth, I am. But there’s a whole pantheon of poets who access the mind and heart through the ear, and this is where Applewhite belongs. But perhaps it’s not that simple. Yes, it’s true that Applewhite tends to write passages like in “A Dream of the Sun,” when he says, “In these ellipses of time / on an earth that is familiar as my home / my soul dreams a farther circle / as it figures the greater whole.” And it’s true that he can present himself
N C L R ONLINE
47
as a solitary figure, following the private impulses of consciousness. But it’s important to note that Applewhite’s persona seldom wanders “lonely as a cloud.” The tone is gentle and intimate; the backdrop often domestic; and the mode is typically “we” or “our” rather than “I” or “mine.” Marriage is either inferred or addressed in other ways, as well: Penelope and Odysseus appear, as do Adam and Eve – who appear for the first time in the poem “Afterward,” whose epigraph is the last line of John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Through Eden took their solitary way.” Well, the way might be solitary, but it is theirs – it belongs to Adam and Eve, and in the imagination of the poem, to James and Jan Applewhite. The poet also brings other loved people and places to life in his work, including North Carolina’s legendary Randall Jarrell (one of Applewhite’s teachers), in the unforgettable poem “Rilke in the Mountains.” I’ve often wondered what Jarrell might’ve been like in class. Applewhite puts me there by mixing Jarrell’s poetic voice with his own: “I remember / his syllables falling musically precisely, / conveying us into a different country / in a century also only a part of history.” There’s a graceful authority here that is itself a quiet celebration. Overall, the poetry of Time Beginnings is wonderfully nuanced in the mind’s ear, but for full effect I think it ought to be read aloud. I don’t think it’s possible to completely savor Applewhite’s ingenious rhymes and cadences and other sound effects without somehow hearing them. Another quality