Plankhouse: Poems and Photographs

A. R. Ammons has called Shelby Stephenson "the poet par excellence of the distinctive culture of Southeastern North Carolina. He sings the moods of the mockingbird, ditch bank, tobacco field with an accuracy and fullness unavailable elsewhere, saving a way of life for us even as it is passing."Shelby Stephenson in Plankhouse focuses on growing up on the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s. He describes the rapidly disappearing rural life in a series of short, intensely visualized sketches.Photographer Roger Manley uses a wide-angle panoramic camera to photograph the flat, limited vistas of the coastal plains that provided the context for Stephenson's vignettes. The resulting book balances image and word.