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A Field of First Things
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 16, 2024
This book was required reading for my MFA program and I’ve since recommended to many people who are not typically fans of poetry— I believe it could be a powerful conversion tool. My main impression of the book was that of a speaker anxious to give many memories a soft place to land. I found it delightfully accessible, full of simple beauty, and comfortable to settle into.
February 26, 2024
I'm sharing here the long version of the endorsement I wrote for this timely book.
In “Some Notes on Song,” John Berger writes, “Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” It’s an apt metaphor for Greg Pape’s A Field of First Things. On the rivers of memory and imagination, reverie and dream, and fueled by a love of and life in letters, the poems in Greg Pape’s A Field of First Things begin in early childhood on Florida’s Captiva Island and on through late adolescence in and around central California and northeastern Arizona. They exist in the margins between elegy and ode for landscapes—mountains, valleys, deserts, and coasts—and the people who inhabited those places. Through them, Pape offers us a kaleidoscopic view of the bewildering ways that “beauty, tenderness, violence / and ignorance can be strands of the same rope braiding / or unraveling a day.”
Moving with the sure steps of Levertov’s dog in “Overland to the Islands,” Pape, a poet who has worn his learning lightly, waves to Melville and Dante, Wordsworth and Frost, Whitman and T’ao Ch’ien; and hails Peter Matthiessen and Jim Harrison figured as birds. “Miracles / and catastrophes abound, and in childhood / they take on an especially personal tone,” Pape tells us (think Bishop and Kunitz), in poems haunted by experiences the younger self did not have words for—especially of having to leave behind La Casa Contenta and Roddy, a beloved collie, an experience that marks the moment “that first heaven of contentment collapsed.”
In “Road Trip with Lulu,” featuring an aging black retriever as co-pilot, we are taken on a three-day journey from the Bitterroot Valley to the Santa Barbara coast. This marvelous long poem is a gravitational field for poems in a book by a poet who came of age under the twinned shadows of The Bomb and large-scale clear cutting. A Field of First Things is a remarkable book that serves as a songline for feeling one’s way into the world in this one.
In “Some Notes on Song,” John Berger writes, “Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” It’s an apt metaphor for Greg Pape’s A Field of First Things. On the rivers of memory and imagination, reverie and dream, and fueled by a love of and life in letters, the poems in Greg Pape’s A Field of First Things begin in early childhood on Florida’s Captiva Island and on through late adolescence in and around central California and northeastern Arizona. They exist in the margins between elegy and ode for landscapes—mountains, valleys, deserts, and coasts—and the people who inhabited those places. Through them, Pape offers us a kaleidoscopic view of the bewildering ways that “beauty, tenderness, violence / and ignorance can be strands of the same rope braiding / or unraveling a day.”
Moving with the sure steps of Levertov’s dog in “Overland to the Islands,” Pape, a poet who has worn his learning lightly, waves to Melville and Dante, Wordsworth and Frost, Whitman and T’ao Ch’ien; and hails Peter Matthiessen and Jim Harrison figured as birds. “Miracles / and catastrophes abound, and in childhood / they take on an especially personal tone,” Pape tells us (think Bishop and Kunitz), in poems haunted by experiences the younger self did not have words for—especially of having to leave behind La Casa Contenta and Roddy, a beloved collie, an experience that marks the moment “that first heaven of contentment collapsed.”
In “Road Trip with Lulu,” featuring an aging black retriever as co-pilot, we are taken on a three-day journey from the Bitterroot Valley to the Santa Barbara coast. This marvelous long poem is a gravitational field for poems in a book by a poet who came of age under the twinned shadows of The Bomb and large-scale clear cutting. A Field of First Things is a remarkable book that serves as a songline for feeling one’s way into the world in this one.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews