The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets

As McFee observes in the introduction, most anthologies tend to favor variety rather than depth-``bouquets rather than whole fields of flowers.'' By selecting the work of only 15 contemporary North Carolina poets, however, he offers an ample sampling of each poet's work, to give a ``satisfying sense of a poet's full flavor.'' Not surprisingly, part of that ``flavor'' is North Carolina itself-its history, people, food and language. Here are the richly textured blues-poems of Maya Angelou and the lyrical, wonderfully colloquial work of Fred Chappell. Here too is the wryly passionate poetry of Kathryn Stripling Byer, whose voice draws its powerful sense of place from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Perhaps the most tenuous inclusion is A.R. Ammons-a poet who, though originally from North Carolina, has spent the last 30 years in Ithaca, N.Y., and whose poems offer only a slight resonance of anything ``regional,'' much less North Carolinan. Work by James Applewhite, on the other hand, is North Carolinian right down to the tobacco leaf. Evocations of rural tobacco farming appear in his poems with a lyricism as surprising as it is Southern. So while uneven, this ``bouquet'' has a delightful aroma-varied, and pungent with a sense of place. (Nov.)