ABOUT THIS BOOK

Greg Rappleye’s Figured Dark is a collection of contemporary lyric and narrative poems, set in an American landscape, which takes as its implicit theme the journey of the soul from darkness into light.

The voices in the collection call across a vast landscape of myth, memory, and horrific wreckage. In the title poem, speaking of the phenomenon of fireflies rising at night from a southern field, he writes, “I could read this down to a million tiny bodies, / blazing the midnight trees,” but the reader is left to wonder whether any extravagant numbering can account for the massed starlings, dreamy raptors, dome-lighted Firebirds, flaming bodies, junk cars, and deadly archangels that come to ground in Rappleye’s world, where the spiritual exhaustion of Odysseus is visited upon Brian Wilson, and the young John Berryman seeks recompense from a wily family in northern Michigan.

These poems are by turns wise, elegiac, ironic, and wickedly funny. This is a poet who refuses easy categories. If these poems are anything, they are affidavits of a heart at work, building out of darkness a kind of wild redemption, hard-earned in the real world.

Figured Dark is part of the University of Arkansas’s Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Greg Rappleye is corporation counsel for Ottawa County, Grand Haven, Michigan. He’s the author of two poetry collections, Holding Down the Earth and A Path Between Houses, and two chapbooks. A past Bread Loaf Fellow in poetry, he has won a number of awards, including a Pushcart Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and the Brittingham Prize, and he was the first runner up for the 2007 Dorset Prize.

REVIEWS

“Oh the fine, brawling, pungent observation of these poems: ‘the smog-brown sea,’ ‘the baggies-drooping sea’; Homer would be exhilarated and appalled. Greg Rappleye revives the language and revives our powers of seeing. Figured Dark is shot through with light. ” —Linda Gregerson, author of Waterborne and Magnetic North “Rappleye’s poems in Figured Dark come from an imagination without peer. There is nothing predictable about them. As Pound urged his heirs to, Rappleye does make it new, plumbing the palpable ordinary, with a dazzling diversity of images, and through a window we've not looked into before.” —Dan Gerber, author of A Primer on Parallel Lives and A Voice from the River “Figured Dark is a lovely book, heart-stopping, at moments, for its directness. The poems feature a conversational and lyrical plainness. Greg Rappleye fires and tempers metaphor, talk, cultural and literary allusion, and emotion so skillfully that readers can look through to the heart of the matter—the odd details of living and what goodness remains after death's insinuations. ‘What does the body want? / To be a crucible says the body,’ the poet writes. Figured Dark is crucible.” —Carol Frost, author of The Queen's Desertion

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
I
In the Great Field at Mount Holyoke, under a Dome of Stars	000
Caller, What is Your Question?	000
Rainy Afternoon at the Gotham Book Mart	000
Not that Happiness	000
Black Dog	000
Self-portrait, with Epiphany to Come	000
For the Lord G-d Bird, No Longer Extinct	000
At the Museum of Whiskey History	000
My Mother Thinks She's Peggy Lee	000
Gentians	000
Near Gatlinburg	000
After the Divorce	000
After an Illustration by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick, in Which a Whale Takes a Dory in its Maw, and Heads for the Bottom of the Sea	000
Lost-Love Ghazals	000
Feeder	000
Archie Babcock Explains the Accident to John Berryman's Biographer	000
Exile Valise	000
II
Sail On, Sailor	000
Making a Path to the Blackberries	000
Figured Dark	000
Memories of Pittsburgh and Stern	000
American Kestrel	000
Blue Angels	000
Mason's Kitchenettes	000
The Fish Lamp on the Cover of Coastal Living Magazine	000
Glaucoma	000
In Ambient Light	000
Obbligato	000
Letter to M., from Swannanoa	000
Lilacs, for Instance	000
Biopsy	000
After the Diagnosis	000
Swimming at Night	000
Elegy for Light and Balance 	000
III
The Body, Burning	000
Hay Devil	000
Discontinuous Narrative	000
Letter to the Chairwoman of the Reunion Committee	000
Dancing with the Crack Whores, at the Homeless Shelter Run by My Wife	000
Were We Speaking, Had You Asked	000
Letter to Robert in Gearhart	000
Descent	000
Carolina Woodpecker	000
At 48, Walking My Baby Past the Voodoo Lounge	000
Blackbirds	000
The Salt Cairn	000
Lepidopterist	000
On a Visit to His Namesake City, St. Paul Walks Six Blocks of Goodrich Avenue	000

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