Description
Poetry. Art. "Greg Rappleye is a poet of exquisite, lush language, exacting and precise in description, inventive in the re-creation of entire worlds. In this intoxicating and revelatory journey through the Brazilian rain forests of the 19th century, he populates the canvas of his poems with not only the flora and fauna of that time and place, but with the voice and inimitable perspective of its subject: Martin Johnson Heade, an American painter obsessed with the otherworldly appearance and flight of hummingbirds. As Rappleye's imagined Heade confesses, '[I] walk for days to find their tiny hearts / beating in the jungle dark.' Yet for all its meticulous research, the heart of this book is a meditation on connection, on what we willingly give our lives over to. As the poet asks, 'What should we save– / a fallen world, or the life we are finally given to live?'"—Todd Davis
Author Bio
Greg Rappleye's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, America, and other literary journals, and have been widely anthologized. His second book of poems, A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His third book, Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), was first runner-up for the Dorset Prize and was published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series. His numerous awards include the Arts & Letters Prize for poems appearing in this volume, the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Greensboro Review Prize, The Paumanok Poetry Award, and a Pushcart Prize. A former Bread Loaf Fellow, he is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in an old blueberry house just north of the Grand River in Ottawa County, Michigan, with his wife Marcia, their two younger sons and three dogs. Retired now from the active practice of law, he teaches in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Author City: HOLLAND, MI USA