Time Beginnings

This masterful collection, beautifully designed and thought out, introduces us to the mystery and mastery of scientific thought, showing us the wonders of time, space, mind, body, music and image and the scientific method. What’s more, Applewhite illustrates for us how thought and feeling are interwoven with time and space. As he says, we are ‘Dream-beings permitted a consciousness / in time.’ The precision of his diction and details validate these poems and his apt metaphors and liquid rhymes provide the energy for which this journey calls. I am awed by his astonishing achievement and recommend it to every reader who seeks to know what it means to be human. ~Kelly Cherry, author of Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer

Walking along the banks of the Eno River near Durham, or hiking in the woods and watching the heavens, or revisiting the past, James Applewhite plays many roles. Sometimes he is an astronomer and cosmologist, reflecting on the nature of space and time, and the constitution of matter: how like the trees and the ripples on the river we are all stardust. Sometimes he is an art historian and painter, and the forest becomes a great stained-glass window. Sometimes he is a chronicler, recalling Eden or his childhood or Randall Jarrell recalling Rilke amidst students in Greensboro. But he is always first and foremost a poet, turning experience and memory, science and history, love and regret, field and stream, into the warmly structured flow of poems. ~Emily Grosholz