These poems record the partly predictable, partly random representative days in a year that inspire wonder at their swiftness. Seasonal time is reflected in the changing angle of sunlight, and familial time is marked by birthdays and holiday celebrations. Public events take on both a sense of history and a sense of unreality in the bright glare of media attention and shiny celebrity surfaces. All the various time-orders in which we live overlay one another: a red leaf adrift in a stream is emblematic of autumn's recurrence; after years of marriage, a couple's wedding suddenly seems very close. Spurred by the sensation of accelerating days at the turn of the new millennium, James Applewhite explores the interplay of immediate experience and lasting memory, of continuity and change, over time-that elusive, ineffable, yet crucial medium of self-definition and of understanding the cosmos.
A prolific poet, James Applewhite was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2008 and is professor emeritus in creative writing at Duke University. He has received the Associated Writing Programs Contemporary Poetry Prize, the Jean Stein Award in Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.
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