"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 you new perspectives. And if you know a North Carolinian, or any Southerner, who's a long way from 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
