ISBN 0-8071-2150-9. Paperback, 56 pages, 1997. From Louisiana State University Press of Baton Rouge.
In this powerful collection, James Applewhite searches the world, from the back roads of his own American Southeast to the antiquities of Europe, for an expanded awareness of history. Time itself, these poems seem to say, is wholeness, the communion of generations, and it is in history, whether of the world, community, or our own families, that we find the locus of our common yearnings.
Lucid, conversational, and utterly compelling, Daytime and Starlight presents through an array of perspectives the ephemera of memory -- comic strips, love letters, newsreels, popular music, Greek and Roman statuary -- and juxtaposes them with a flawless instinct for the telling detail against contemporary notions of evolution and cosmology. A half-rememberd chiaroscuro of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach, the haunting familiarity of figures in a Renaissance tapestry, the vision of air "green with evening" -- in such brief suspensions of time, love and beauty balance regret and loss. Time and again, in poem after poem, Applewhite strikes a clear, bell-like tone of affirmation: "We're all in this together."
"Applewhite is one of the most individual and interesting of contemporary poets." -- Virginia Quarterly Review
"James Applewhite's Daytime and Starlight is a lyrical dream of home places, parents, solitude, and ease, a pastoral walk through a very personal history. But it's also poetry of all our histories if we have the wit and the will to see through the clouding shadows. Eloquent, elegiac, electric as the single naked light bulb in a farmhouse where once we thrilled to the old stories, Daytime and Starlight is Applewhite's best poetry. It turns and returns us until we find ourselves in those rooms we thought consigned to history, those contingencies of the heart we thought resolved." -- Dave Smith
Among James Applewhite's numerous honors are the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters' Jean Stein Award in Poetry, the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, the North Carolina Award in Literature, and election into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is professor of English at Duke University.
