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Wind Apples
“Here, then gone. We sense each / other in the dark, hands outstretched beneath / humming wires, holding on,” Jeff Ewing writes toward the end of Wind Apples, an astonishingly aching collection of poems that resonate and vibrate, so struck with awe are they. His poems bear witness to the ephemeral—not always as elegy, but as a way to wonder and to make monument out of fleeting moments of beauty in the natural world, or fleeting connections between people—be they lovers or family members. And though those hands reach out, Ewing also reminds us that “the gods let us know when we’ve overreached.” In poem after burnished poem, he lights the darkness for us, allows us to see clearly a world that is here, then gone. He inspires us to keep looking, and not to turn away.
—James Allen Hall
—James Allen Hall
102 pages, Paperback
First published May 26, 2021
2 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Ewing
4 books28 followersJeff Ewing's fiction has been widely published in prominent literary magazines, including Crazyhorse, Southwest Review, Cherry Tree, upstreet, and New World Writing. His poems can be found in numerous literary journals, including Subtropics, Atlanta Review, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran, Tar River Poetry, and Willow Springs. His full-length play The Middle of Nowhere received the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Award and world premiered at the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, New York. His one-act plays have won the FirstStage Prize and have been featured in the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival. He works as a technical writer and editor in Sacramento, California.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 25, 2021
Sublime, haunting, vivid, heartfelt writing. Jeff Ewing is one of my favorite writers and one of the best.
June 10, 2021
Wind Apples
Jeff Ewing
Terrapin Books • ISBN-10 : 1947896431 • ISBN-13 : 978-1947896437 -- 2021
Jeff Ewing’s poems live in a world between nature and action. Poem after poem captures the essence of the natural world, often places us right back in our past, but Wind Apples offers much more. Here is a collection of memories and details that takes readers to a place, a time, an atmosphere, a moment as if they were living an experience all over again.
Wild Apples is both a nostalgic look back and a coming of age collection with poems about youth and teen years and “meaning is bound up in the belly of everything,” including baseball, drive-ins, old barns and cellars, rice fields, Picnic Day, and kids battling for kicking balls. Sometimes the poems are very in the present as when his daughter is trying to teach him the names of clouds, but mostly he looks back; he realizes, “Here, then gone. We sense each/other in the dark, hands outstretched beneath/humming wires, holding on to/a last wedge of pearled sky,/believing we can by combined will call/back to our feet the just-kicked can.”
In “In Shade Her Scars Nearly Vanish,” he writes, “You can hear the wind lisping/inside, the dry rattle of the smaller branches;/later, when full twilight comes on, everywhere/is shade and moths rising blindly through the/grass like living ash floating up and up and up. The quality of the sensory appeal is this stunning throughout the book.
Rain, storms, wind, cottonwood and meadowlands define the settings. Whether it’s swimming in Walden Pond or wandering in an orchard “ghosted with fog,” the language is apt and the detail sharp and sensory. In “As the Crow Flies,” readers encounter “The white stones/like rows of teeth, roads like knotted shoelaces” and “Pinfeathers whirr like cards in spokes,/the shrill cry—gravel on tin—rattles downslope.” In “The Dunes,” he writes, “Against a sunken fence/the dry husk of a blue crab glows, illuminated pink from within, snagging your dress as you pass.”
Poem after poem provides this precision and detail, but in addition, what starts as a memory ends up with layers of meaning. In “Adios Westerner Drive-In,” he says, “so much for dusk/washing against/banks of fenders,/asphalt cresting in rutted breakers rimed with grass.” The poem ends
What a spectacle
we must be, falling
ass-backward
through our lives
with the volume cranked.
Fumbling as surer
hands unknot
their puzzles above us
and our exit music
settles like dew
on the star thistle
and milkweed.
Nature becomes a backdrop, a parallel juxtaposition to the themes so a part of all of our lives “growing up fast, living large.” This collection is a great read for everyone and a tribute to the past.
Jeff Ewing
Terrapin Books • ISBN-10 : 1947896431 • ISBN-13 : 978-1947896437 -- 2021
Jeff Ewing’s poems live in a world between nature and action. Poem after poem captures the essence of the natural world, often places us right back in our past, but Wind Apples offers much more. Here is a collection of memories and details that takes readers to a place, a time, an atmosphere, a moment as if they were living an experience all over again.
Wild Apples is both a nostalgic look back and a coming of age collection with poems about youth and teen years and “meaning is bound up in the belly of everything,” including baseball, drive-ins, old barns and cellars, rice fields, Picnic Day, and kids battling for kicking balls. Sometimes the poems are very in the present as when his daughter is trying to teach him the names of clouds, but mostly he looks back; he realizes, “Here, then gone. We sense each/other in the dark, hands outstretched beneath/humming wires, holding on to/a last wedge of pearled sky,/believing we can by combined will call/back to our feet the just-kicked can.”
In “In Shade Her Scars Nearly Vanish,” he writes, “You can hear the wind lisping/inside, the dry rattle of the smaller branches;/later, when full twilight comes on, everywhere/is shade and moths rising blindly through the/grass like living ash floating up and up and up. The quality of the sensory appeal is this stunning throughout the book.
Rain, storms, wind, cottonwood and meadowlands define the settings. Whether it’s swimming in Walden Pond or wandering in an orchard “ghosted with fog,” the language is apt and the detail sharp and sensory. In “As the Crow Flies,” readers encounter “The white stones/like rows of teeth, roads like knotted shoelaces” and “Pinfeathers whirr like cards in spokes,/the shrill cry—gravel on tin—rattles downslope.” In “The Dunes,” he writes, “Against a sunken fence/the dry husk of a blue crab glows, illuminated pink from within, snagging your dress as you pass.”
Poem after poem provides this precision and detail, but in addition, what starts as a memory ends up with layers of meaning. In “Adios Westerner Drive-In,” he says, “so much for dusk/washing against/banks of fenders,/asphalt cresting in rutted breakers rimed with grass.” The poem ends
What a spectacle
we must be, falling
ass-backward
through our lives
with the volume cranked.
Fumbling as surer
hands unknot
their puzzles above us
and our exit music
settles like dew
on the star thistle
and milkweed.
Nature becomes a backdrop, a parallel juxtaposition to the themes so a part of all of our lives “growing up fast, living large.” This collection is a great read for everyone and a tribute to the past.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews