The North Carolina Poems - A. R. Ammons

Edited and with a new Afterword by Alex Albright

Paperback, 144 pages
Publication Date: October 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9802117-2-6

‘I'm constantly lonely, at least I think I am—
for North Carolina…hoping some day to be
better known there.’
—A.R. Ammons (1969)

Broadstone Books is proud to return to print this work by one of the most honored American poets of the 20th century. The poems included in this revised and expanded edition of Ammons’s North Carolina Poems span his poetic career. Several were published after the original
edition appeared in 1994 and two have not been previously collected.

If you aren't familiar with one of the Old North State’s best-known poets, The North Carolina Poems is a good introduction. If you do know Ammons’ work, Alex Albright’s fresh juxtapositions will give home, by all means send them this book. The images and sounds, as potent as a whiff of barbecue, will transport the wanderer home, for a time anyway.

—Michael Chitwood

Archie—few who came to know him called him by any other name—said that this collection of his poems, when it was first published in 1994, was ‘a literary makeover that feels like home.’ The poems added to this new edition, like those in the first, include works which refer directly to places and people the poet knew in North Carolina, but there are some which, poetically, simply feel like North Carolina (no doubt that Southern voice, that attention to place, a yearning for home), and still others which surely could have originated in any Carolina yard or woods or shore, though they came to Archie in New Jersey or New York. The poet's sometimes idiosyncratic punctuation and spelling have been retained: some poems end in colons, others with no end punctuation at all. But that’s all part of the fun of reading the work of this playful and philosophical Tar Heel called by William Harmon ‘the state’s greatest poet ever.’ But clearly, his poetry has transcended regional identity."

—Alex Albright, editor, from the Afterword

[A] welcome new edition. While Albright highlights work set (or possible set) in North Carolina, he gives us a selection that in virtually every other respect provides a representative cross-section of Ammon's ouevre. The North Carolina Poems is an essential book for anyone interested in A. R. Ammons.

—Robert West, North Carolina Literary Review, No. 20, 2011

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) grew up on a subsistence farm near Whiteville, in Columbus County. A 1948 graduate of Wake Forest College, he was for many years the Goldwin-Smith Distinguished Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Cornell University. During his long and available to poets, including two National Book Awards, the Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Library of Congress’ Bobbit National Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1981, he was one of the original recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, better known as the Genius Award. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2000.

Alex Albright, a Graham, North Carolina native, is an associate professor of English and director of creative writing at East Carolina University. He was founding editor of the North Carolina Literary Review, for which Ammons was staff poet from 1991-96.