Philip Belcher
Philip Belcher is the Vice President, Programs, of The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina in Asheville, NC and the author of a chapbook, The Flies and Their Lovely Names, from Stepping Stones Press. A graduate of Furman University, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Duke University School of Law, he also has an MFA in Poetry from Converse College. Belcher’s poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals, including The Southeast Review, The Southern Quarterly,Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review and The South Carolina Review.
Reading List
APOCALYPSE MIX (Autumn House, 2017) by Jane Satterfield
In her Autumn House Poetry Prize-winning book, Apocalypse Mix, Jane Satterfield presents a bracing and resigned account of the human condition by confronting the contradictions of living in a circumstance of perpetual hostility. Stylistic and thematic commonalities unify the volume, …
MONTICELLO IN MIND: 50 Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (UVA, 2016), edited by Lisa Russ Spaar
Although William Faulkner’s oft-paraphrased claim that “[t]he past is never dead. It’s not even past,” is by its own terms continuously relevant, there are times during which its applicability seems more immediate than others. This is one of those times. …
ENTWINED: THREE LYRIC SEQUENCES (Tupelo Press) by Carol Frost
Frost, Carol. Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences. North Adams, Massachusetts: Tupelo Press, 2014. Reviewed by Philip Belcher Two readily discernible emotions accompany the experience of reading for the first time a well-published poet of significant talent. First is embarrassment at not …
New Year, White County, Arkansas
Air vent streamers wag like tongues from the wall of the Ozark cave. Cold stiffens the stream splitting the floor, and the cracking ice pops. Beneath the glaze, blind fish swim, pale sloops defying the current’s mute push. Outside, …
THE BOOK OF GOODBYES (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013) by Jillian Weise
Reviewed by Philip Belcher Winning the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the same year’s James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets should be sufficient to recommend Jillian Weise’s The Book of Goodbyes to the reading public. Still, …
DESCENT by Katherine Stripling Byer (LSU, 2012)
What a pleasure it’s been to spend time with Kay Byer’s volume of meditative poems and find there a poetry that is profound but that resists the temptation to flaunt all of the effort it took to be that way. …
The Chameleon Couch (FSG, 2011) by Yusef Komunyakaa
Reviewed by Philip Belcher Komunyakaa Review Erudition as Disguise On occasion, an eager and adept reader happens upon a poetry collection that satisfies immediately. The lyric intensity of individual poems may carry the volume, or the narrative arc may be …
Waking by Ron Rash
Waking by Ron Rash (Hub City Press, 2011) Reviewed by Philip Belcher Since I first read “Under Jocassee” in Ron Rash’s 2002 collection Raising the Dead and followed the speaker’s urging to look beneath my boat and into …
Review of Floyd Collins
What Harvest: Poems on the Siege & Battle of the Alamo by Floyd Collins (Somondoco Press, 2011) I have not thought much, if any, about the Alamo since elementary school. If high school or college history books discussed it, those …
Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
LANDSCAPE FOR GRIEF Christian Wiman’s exploration of grief and faith in Every Riven Thing, his third poetry collection, will not satisfy readers expecting either easy access or a sense of closure. The literary and thematic connections with Wiman’s first two …