Language They Speak Is Things to Eat: Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets Book

North Carolina is well known for its fiction writers, but the state is also home to a number of the nation's best poets. In the past few decades, these poets have produced memorable work and received numerous honors. A companion to the contemporary North Carolina fiction anthology The Rough Road Home (1992), this book provides a substantial sampling of their recent bounty.

Poet Michael McFee has chosen from eight to twenty poems by each of fifteen poets. There is a refreshing diversity in the voices, from James Applewhite's down east tobacco farmer to Gerald Barrax's passionate urban man to Kathryn Stripling Byer's isolated mountain woman. The humor ranges from Maya Angelou's serious wit to Jonathan Williams's verbal improvisations. And there is a healthy variety in form and tone, from A. R. Ammons's free verse ruminations to Fred Chappell's vigorous, witty narratives in traditional forms.

But there is also a fundamental unity to these poets. They are all North Carolina writers, who were born in or have long lived in the state, and whose verbal consciousness has been shaped by the very nature of the place. Most importantly, they are all poets we can read with appreciation and great pleasure.

contributors Betty Adcock A. R. Ammons Maya Angelou James Applewhite Gerald Barrax Kathryn Stripling Byer Fred Chappell William Harmon Susan Ludvigson Michael McFee Heather Ross Miller Robert Morgan Reynolds Price James Seay Jonathan Williams

Publishers Weekly

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.)