Organized into four sections, each comprising free verse poems, Jeff Ewing’s debut poetry collection Wind Apples (Terrapin Books, 2021) amazes me with its pervasive, melancholic mood, brought to life by captivating images of cities and scenic landscapes. Although the book does not include a single narrative through-line, Ewing at times places me in clear, distinct settings reflecting his speakers’ desire to reconcile nihilism with a fascination of the natural world, a place where beauty and misery often intersect.
In “Pantoum of a Mild Depression,” Ewing directly invokes the book’s melancholic mood by referencing nature:

I feel it coming on
across the disordered room,
a slow hollowing-out
harmless as a baby rattler.

across the disordered room,
mouths open, close;
harmless as a baby rattler,
the TV hisses.

The reliance on refrains, a key facet of pantoums, emphasizes the cyclical nature of mild depression, that even though depression may seem “harmless as a baby rattler” at first, depression itself can return again and again, just like the book’s dominant melancholic mood.
Ewing contrasts the mood with glimpses of speculative wonder. In “When the Dead Walk in Dubuque,” Ewing imagines ghosts congregating in Dubuque, Iowa, and the nearby Mississippi River:

How can one leave such a paradise? Would you not too, given the chance, gather
a final time here as once when young with arms wreaked by distance all
that was lost and left in the rabbit hole of your short history, clutch your earthly

tchotchkes too tightly for even death to steal, gather once more my unlikeliest
friend as if some life or other depended on it in the blue shadow of the Ice Harbor,
here by the river, within spitting distance of the beautiful, the beautiful river?

I especially admire this poem because as a Dubuque native myself, I appreciate the sincerity Ewing blends with his meditation, a blending that ultimately pays respect to my hometown, a place whose complicated history and scenic radiance are often ignored.
The strongest aspect of Wind Apples, however, is the concrete imagery. In “As the Crow Flies,” Ewing depicts despair in a rainy landscape with a crow:

What madness can rival the sight of us scrabbling over
           ridge and moraine? The crow feathers his wings,
                     hovers a black eye above the country bent under
           its load. Pinfeathers whirr like cards in spokes,
the shrill cry—gravel on tin—rattles downslope.

Ewing incorporates hyperbole to draw attention to the crow’s more macabre, metaphorical role. For example, to say that “the country [is] bent under / its load” suggests that the world is suffocating with the same nihilism the speaker and perhaps millions like him feel. Ultimately, the crow’s deeper connotations resonate and linger with me: “the shrill cry” of the crow is compared to “gravel on tin”—a stentorian, unnerving sound that appears to echo throughout the poem, which reflects the thematic and emotional malaise with its off-set stanzas.
A well-crafted poetry book debut, Ewing’s Wind Apples stays consistently dramatic thanks to its melancholic mood and imagery. Each poem feels like a microcosm of often implied despair and wonder.