The View from Wrightsville Beach

In this three-part collection of 12 poems, written between 1959 and 1987, the author recalls the Wrightsville Beach of his youth, the pre-condominium era of the late 1950s. The View from Wrightsville Beach is a love story on two levels, sketching the awakening of a boy's sensuality through his lyrical devotion to the Carolina seashore, and his seeking for and discovery of a girl who will share with him a dream strong enough to last beyond the protective, magic aura of sea and sand. The book is dedicated to their daughter, Anna, who lived for a time at Wrightsville Beach. The author's late uncle, the Reverend J. Leon Malone, was once rector of St. Andrew's-on-the-Sound Episcopal Church near the beach, where Lynda, the girl in the book and later the author's wife, is buried. She died in 2007. His parents operated Malone Apartments on South Lumina Avenue, Wrightsville Beach, between 1958 and 1960. Malone has published two previous volumes of poems, The Cleared Place of Tara (1970) and The Tapestry Maker (Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, Publisher, 1972).