These Our Offerings

Poems by William P. Baldwin

Photographs by Selden B. Hill, Sharon Cumbee, Robert Epps & William P. Baldwin

These Our Offerings features the photographs of Selden B. Hill, Sharon Cumbee, Robert Epps, William P. Baldwin and the poems of William P. Baldwin.

Softcover, Arts & Culture

$28.95

SKU: 978-1-929647-11-8 Category: Tag:

These Our Offerings features the photographs of Selden B. Hill, Sharon Cumbee, Robert Epps, William P. Baldwin and the poems of William P. Baldwin.

About the Author

william baldwin headshot

A lifelong resident of the South Carolina Lowcountry, William P. Baldwin is an award- winning novelist, poet, biographer and historian. He graduated from Clemson University with a BA in History and an MA in English. He ran a shrimp boat for nine years then built houses, but the principle occupation of his life has been writing.

His works include Charleston, Charleston Impressions, Daytrips from Charleston, Plantations of the Lowcountry, Lowcountry Plantations Today (all with architectural photographer N. Jane Iseley), and the oral histories Mrs. Whaley and her Charleston Garden and Heaven is a Beautiful Place. The screenplay for the latter earned him a Silver Remy at the Houston Film Festival. For its depiction of Southern race relations, his novel The Hard to Catch Mercy won the Lillian Smith Award. He collaborated with photographer V. Elizabeth Turk on Mantelpieces of the Old South and wrote the text for chef Charlotte Jenkins’ Gullah Cuisine.

Done with photographer Selden Hill and published in 2011, The Unpainted South won the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Gold Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry. The follow up collection, These Our Offerings, earned a second Benjamin Franklin award.

His writing has also appeared in Charleston, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Victoria, Veranda and Southern Accents magazines.

About the Photographers

Selden HillSelden B. Hill is a photographer, pen and ink artist, historian, and the founding director of The Village Museum at McClellanville, S.C. In earlier years, he worked as a type setter and layout artist, played a lot of pool, and sold a lot of furniture, and in the opinion of his friends each occupation, in its own way, has helped to make him a better photographer. As museum director, he’s offered encouragement and employment to both photographers and writers and curated many photography shows. Along with Susan Hoffer McMillan he is the author of the photography collection McClellanville and the St. James Santee Parish published in 2006. He still spends his free time exploring the less traveled paths of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Nothing gives him greater pleasure than stumbling upon the perfect photographic subject: a derelict tobacco barn framed by live oaks, with white puffy clouds overhead, and dark streaming shadows in the foreground.

 

Robert EppsRobert Epps is a photographer and architect. He began his collegiate studies as a fine arts major at the University of South Carolina. He received a Masters of Architecture degree from Clemson University in 1977. While pursuing his Masters of Architecture degree, he studied photography under nationally prominent photography educator Sam Wang. This study concluded with a solo exhibit at the Clemson University Student Union Gallery with a selection of black-and-white silver prints. In more recent years he has exhibited as part of the Piccolo Spoleto celebration and other Charleston venues.  He uses a 4×5 Line of view camera. All his images are captured on traditional film.  While producing 32” x 40” large color prints requires more involved technical processes, his smaller 16”x 20” black-and-white silver prints are produced by traditional enlarger process in his office/studio at 1 Pinckney Street in Charleston.

 

Sharon CumbeeSharon Cumbee says, “I am a singer/ songwriter with a passion for good music, musicians, and songwriters. If you took a southern belle, crossed her with a swampwater-fed country gal, gave her the love of the lowcountry, then you could name her Sharon Cumbee. Correction. I am a singer/songwriter with a passion for good music, musicians, and songwriters. Besides my family, friends and music…my other love is photography!”

Reviews

“These Our Offerings is just that: These Our Offerings. There are five sections, each beginning with a combination of my poetry and the work of a particular photographer (Selden “Bud” Hill, Sharon Cumbee, Robert Epps, or Wm. Baldwin). Then comes a collection of photographs from that photographer suggesting a particular vision of the Southern world—at least that sacred portion found between Savannah, Georgia and Myrtle Beach South Carolina. It’s called The lowcountry, a place of low and swampy, salty, sandy, muddy lands grown thick with marsh, oaks, myrtles, and magnolias, zinnias and camellias,  a place with a dark past, a place of loss and decay where we also find great beauty and hopefully a bright future. This is an ambitious book and in its battle with time, an intensely romantic one.”  — William Baldwin 

The poems in These Are Offerings, A Place & Time of Southern Magic, are heartfelt, salt-tinged, rooted in place, and full of the kind of wisdom we expect from a life well lived. Each poem is a lyrical celebration of the ordinary, like the photographs that inspired them.  Whether it’s a dog, a kiss, a boat, a garden; oysters, sea birds, creeks, or barbecues; shadows or clouds; a birthday or anniversary; each poem and photograph is a blessing that reminds us all that we have to be grateful for.” — Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina Poet Laureate