ISBN 0-8071-2774-4. Paperback, 54 pages, 2002. From Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge.
"James Applewhite is a permanent American poet. His masterpiece, to date, is River Writing: An Eno Journal, but Quartet for Three Voices seems to me the sublime of his lyric achievement. He discovers a form here that holds together autobiography, high imaginative culture, and our everyday lives." -- Harold Bloom
"There's a whole man here, and a lifetime. A lot of poets are piping on one note these days, and Applewhite is symphonic by comparison." -- Brendan Galvin
"Applewhite's is a sane, intense, distinctive voice powerfully meditating galactic conformations of southern nights, lyrical subtleties of race in Carolina tobacco country. At home with the elements, his visions of flight from Kitty Hawk to Nighthawks dazzle with sweep and immediacy. While we are moved and instructed by wry reminders of the twentieth century's flaming inhumanities, we are never more present with the poet than in his astonishing recounting of the passing of friendship, family, farm...the full firmness and utter faith of youth. The seasoned poet sings stanzas of our destined incompletions. This volume marks Applewhite's place as permanent and essential in canons of American poetry." -- Houston A. Baker, Jr.
About the author: James Applewhite has received the Associated Writing Programs Contemporary Poetry Prize, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award in Poetry, the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, the Governor's North Carolina Award in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of eight previous poetry books, most recently Daytime and Starlight, and is a professor of English at Duke University.
