Terrapin Books
Because “the past denies that one long night ago it was the future,” Ewing’s collection speaks to timelessness as both conqueror & protector. In well-drawn scenes, the poems evoke a natural world at odds with humanity & the violences that accrue when the two intersect. Each poem is mired in suspense, waiting: for death—or worse, for catastrophic failures to occur that will render the world unalterably changed. Grappling with time & mortality & loss, Ewing honestly & deftly renders a present in which there is much to be mourned because there is much to love, even that which, once witnessed, is shed as “living ash floating up and up and up.”
– Chelsea Dingman
“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. Ewing’s 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: “the gods let us know when we’ve overreached.” In poem after burnished poem, Ewing lights the darkness for us, allows us to see clearly a world that is here, then gone. We look through a “rented window” “imprinted with a vision of the world as it once was.” Jeff Ewing inspires us to keep looking, and not to turn away.
– James Allen Hall
“Man and nature are both at odds and in harmony in Jeff Ewing’s Wind Apples. Ewing understands that “we are raised for reasons that aren’t ours, plans so obscure we may never know their past.” A less accomplished observer might find this a reason for despair, but Ewing ends the poem by reminding us of “spring pulsing inside…waiting.” It is this acceptance of the interwoven nature of our existence, where the longing for a child echoes in a car’s refusal to start, the catching of a fish predicts a child’s health, that makes Ewing’s debut so striking.
– Al Maginnes
