A History of the River: Poems

Looking back upon forebears who lived among the forests and rivers of his native North Carolina, Applewhite ( Lessons in Soaring ) chronicles Southern culture during simpler, less sophisticated times. A kind of poetic oral history, these dense poems detail a world of tobacco farms, log cabins and horse-driven carriages, a world slowly being encroached upon by modern conveniences like automobiles and tractors. In one poem a man stands in the shadow of the ``unnatural light'' of ``the television's phosphorescent glow'' while the poet contemplates whether technology has made life any better for his country kinfolk. But Applewhite frequently buries the emotional potential of his themes in excessively nuanced descriptions, as in a piece about the pride of hand labor: ``Broom sedge colonized, its sunset-tan extending / in feathery ranks homogenous as wheat. Evergreen seedlings / then bulked up gradually. . . .'' Overall, however, Applewhite uses his impressive knowledge of the culture about which he writes--and his capacious memory--to skillfully evoke a lost time and place, one in which life was full of hardship, but clearly more comprehensible. (Feb.)