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Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields
In her first book, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, Ashley Capps sounds like the voice of a fresh generation of poets, where the familiar turns suddenly elliptical, straight talk goes engagingly crooked, and the lyric negotiates with the matter-of-fact. Desperate for something solid to believe in, Capps still mistrusts authority, feeling disenchanted with God, family, eros, even her own impulsive self. And yet while the absence of faith hints at despair, these poems often achieve, almost inspite of themselves, an odd buoyancy. Playful, fearless, wary, there's a dazzling resilience in this book. One poem can make a grand and eccentric claim, I forgive the afterlife, while another takes as its title something humbler and more poisonous, God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake. No matter how adrift this poet may feel, poetry itself remains her anchor and lifeline.
- GenresPoetry
69 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
August 31, 2013
"When my mother lifted her shirt
to show the sunken grave of her breast,
the fresh tarantula tattoo she'd chosen
over reconstruction, I shuddered at first.
The last bad joke she'd play on her body--"
These are the opening lines from this book's hell of a second poem "God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake." Several short stanzas later: "She prayed/for my sister to take the For Sale sign off/of her body and come home to sleep in a new pair/of soft pajamas. My sister could not." We learn about the speaker's (her father's, actually) "double helix permanently scarred," the mother's "broken nose a study in cubism," and the family's scarecrow, which the speaker describes as being "the best-dressed."
Some of my other favorites from the collection: "The Sign Said," "Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields," "Home Stay," "The Wedding," "Poem on the Occasion of My MRI."
If you are the type of reader who appreciates unobtrusive emotion wrapped in a concise, humble yet unmistakably deft, distinctly contemporary package, you would be wise to add this collection to your shelf. There is much to relish: the visceral language and enjambed lines, sometimes-banal-sometimes-absurd observations and misfit details, not-too-loose-but-not-too-rigid organization (both within the individual poems and in the structure of the four-part book as a whole), and last but not least, those final punches to the gut. I don't mean "punches" as a reduction or implication of one cheesy "gotcha" moment after another; I mean something more akin to those T.S. Eliot "not with a bang but a whimper" moments. Clear yet unassuming moments that invite you, the reader, to tie it all together in a satisfying "ah, yes" as you sit back, close your eyes, and feel.
to show the sunken grave of her breast,
the fresh tarantula tattoo she'd chosen
over reconstruction, I shuddered at first.
The last bad joke she'd play on her body--"
These are the opening lines from this book's hell of a second poem "God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake." Several short stanzas later: "She prayed/for my sister to take the For Sale sign off/of her body and come home to sleep in a new pair/of soft pajamas. My sister could not." We learn about the speaker's (her father's, actually) "double helix permanently scarred," the mother's "broken nose a study in cubism," and the family's scarecrow, which the speaker describes as being "the best-dressed."
Some of my other favorites from the collection: "The Sign Said," "Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields," "Home Stay," "The Wedding," "Poem on the Occasion of My MRI."
If you are the type of reader who appreciates unobtrusive emotion wrapped in a concise, humble yet unmistakably deft, distinctly contemporary package, you would be wise to add this collection to your shelf. There is much to relish: the visceral language and enjambed lines, sometimes-banal-sometimes-absurd observations and misfit details, not-too-loose-but-not-too-rigid organization (both within the individual poems and in the structure of the four-part book as a whole), and last but not least, those final punches to the gut. I don't mean "punches" as a reduction or implication of one cheesy "gotcha" moment after another; I mean something more akin to those T.S. Eliot "not with a bang but a whimper" moments. Clear yet unassuming moments that invite you, the reader, to tie it all together in a satisfying "ah, yes" as you sit back, close your eyes, and feel.
February 5, 2021
I bought Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields because I loved the title and all that it evoked--for instance, if I am mistaking the sea for a green field, does that mean I am going to walk into the grass only to find that I am drowning? Or will I be thrown a life-vest by some fellow traveler? Although I bought it for its title, it is the searing honesty of these poems that have kept this book close on my shelf. It is a book you will come back to again and again. Every poem appears to be coming at you head-on and then, suddenly, in each poem, you are blindsided by revelations or details you didn't see coming. You find yourself not on solid ground, but in the ocean.
The common threads that hold this collection so brilliantly together are the themes of loss, of mistakes--those you have moved on from and those that you are still choosing, of the story of our bodies, of how we do or do not belong where we have found ourselves. Ashley Capps is a whip-smart observer of human folly, writing poems that both lacerate and heal. Throughout this astonishing collection, she manages to plunge you unsuspecting into the sea, but also to fervently rescue you.
The best thing I could ever say about any book--whether poetry, fiction, or nonfiction--is that when you finish it you are not the same. That when you put it down, you wish to high heaven it was not over. Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields is just such a book.
The common threads that hold this collection so brilliantly together are the themes of loss, of mistakes--those you have moved on from and those that you are still choosing, of the story of our bodies, of how we do or do not belong where we have found ourselves. Ashley Capps is a whip-smart observer of human folly, writing poems that both lacerate and heal. Throughout this astonishing collection, she manages to plunge you unsuspecting into the sea, but also to fervently rescue you.
The best thing I could ever say about any book--whether poetry, fiction, or nonfiction--is that when you finish it you are not the same. That when you put it down, you wish to high heaven it was not over. Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields is just such a book.
March 18, 2008
HYMN FOR TWO CHOIRS
Best apple I ever had was three o’clock
in the morning, somewhere outside
San Francisco, beach camping, stars holding
the sky together like sutures. I was thinking
how I was going to get old and ask myself
why did I only live for one thing;
at the same time I didn’t know how to change.
I thought I felt like my neighbor’s huge dog—
every day stuffed into a small man’s green T-shirt
and chained to a stake in a yard of incongruous
white tulips. Here and there a red bird, a train.
Way down the beach other tents glowed orange.
I heard a stranger call my name
and another stranger, laughing, answered.
APRIL
Everywhere, the ghost
wigs of dandelions,
everywhere the green
toothache of early spring.
The cops-in-training
are beating their horses,
and they wave at me
from the fields. All the girls
show their shoulders now.
The future promises more
of the same. It is hard
to love people enough.
****Amazon shows these poems too
Best apple I ever had was three o’clock
in the morning, somewhere outside
San Francisco, beach camping, stars holding
the sky together like sutures. I was thinking
how I was going to get old and ask myself
why did I only live for one thing;
at the same time I didn’t know how to change.
I thought I felt like my neighbor’s huge dog—
every day stuffed into a small man’s green T-shirt
and chained to a stake in a yard of incongruous
white tulips. Here and there a red bird, a train.
Way down the beach other tents glowed orange.
I heard a stranger call my name
and another stranger, laughing, answered.
APRIL
Everywhere, the ghost
wigs of dandelions,
everywhere the green
toothache of early spring.
The cops-in-training
are beating their horses,
and they wave at me
from the fields. All the girls
show their shoulders now.
The future promises more
of the same. It is hard
to love people enough.
****Amazon shows these poems too
July 18, 2012
When my workshop became bitterly divided over the quality of "I Used to See Her in the Field Beside My House," [http://www.versedaily.org/iutshitfbmh...], I became rather excited about (and enviously conscious of) the power of Capps' writing. The poem is gorgeous, grotesque, a work of art so effective that it moves the reader almost against her will---an appropriate output considering the topic. I love this poem, and it is stylistically, if not topically, emblematic of others in this collection that wraps in disarmingly sweet lyric an unflinching and stone-eyed gaze at life---ugliness included.
February 26, 2016
Excellent book! Excellent poems! Ashley Capps writes of nature, animal rights activism, family, and life using moving language and beautiful imagery. "Inside Facts," "December," "All Night City Train," "All The Invisible Animals," and "Those Little Deaths" are favorites. This collection of poems was perfect for me.
January 18, 2008
The lilt I'd heard about (from Edan) so long ago is more cutting than I'd imagined. And twisting and startling and of raspberries, like a tattoo on your tongue. Now someone figure out why reading good poetry makes someone think in terms of bad poetry.
September 18, 2017
Re Read 2017-I love the way she changes forms and styles throughout the book. Each section almost repeating the same process as before.
Vivid and moving. Dark and subtle elsewhere
Vivid and moving. Dark and subtle elsewhere
March 30, 2022
Stunning, cosmic, esoteric collection
December 13, 2010
The winner of the 2005 Akron Poetry Prize, Ashley Capps’s Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields is a refreshing, arresting debut endeavor. This is a book that puts on display not only Capps’s deft yet disarming handling of language but also a remarkable determination to enter a perspective of reflection so deep and drunk with consciousness one might easily be lost in the complex yet coherent hallways she has constructed between all the poems of the book.
A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Capps has allowed for a survey of personal history that I can only think to describe as admirable in the courageous variety her ruminations seem to dictate, not merely in recording them but in the subtle judgments and conclusions that seem to resolve throughout the book. This ‘courage’ is not simply the kind that might be tied to the revelation of the personal--like many poems I admire Capps’s don’t seem concerned with audience nor are they weighted down by any notions of pandering to the idea of being received or analyzed. No, the kind of courage I intend to focus on here is the kind implicit in any act of genuine introspection, which is to say the courage of looking backward regardless of what has happened or what dwelling on the past might reveal about a person’s present or future.
Taken in this sense it feels important to acknowledge a sense of courage more complicated and brilliantly cultivated than the expected, pat style of the courageous confessional, as once again a confession denotes two parties or ends of a conversation whereas this book feels like a place much more altogether lonely, absent any kind of easy, misguided defiance or unsatisfying movements that appear to be happy-ending catharsis at work. Rather, I never feel that anything has resolved or become any neater or more digestible at the end of these poems; there are no clear lessons to the spectrum of events the book contains, you’ll find no gift-wrapped epiphanies carrying Capps’s speaker toward some kind of easier or clearer place. This isn’t to say the poems are bleak in their collective whole, but rather don’t seem to shy away from the recognition of uneasy endings or the uncomfortable ratio of bleakness-to-hope that life often forces anyone to deal with at times. Many of these poems feel to me like the aftermath of the paradoxical epiphany that there aren’t really any epiphanies, and the unwieldy realities remain to be dealt with in all their unglamorous concreteness.
What’s left then, it seems, is to survive, to make sense of things when you can and to accept that most things simply don’t feel into any shape. Dean Young says about this book that “Sometimes poetry is able to bring us the news of how people survive”, a fitting perspective that demands a deeper pondering than it might at first seem to because of its simplicity; if as I have stated the book doesn’t make gestures of tidy catharsis, what is left is the curation of life continuing on without the warmth of resolution or epiphany, and this is certainly a book seemingly overflowing with ideas relating to survivability, often in the literal, bodily sense, as in these lines from ‘Poem on the Occasion of My MRI’:
“I’ve begun tipping over
midsentence. Twice at dinner with my parents.
Once near the end of a blow job. He didn’t understand
what was happening. Go home, I stammered, to your wife.
Last week in front of my students, discussing ‘Dream Song: #9’.”
The poem then ends with these lines, highlighting ideas of mortality and aftermath, and above all else a resistance to clean, simplistic hope or answers that deny the mess and multi-faceted nature of the speaker’s reality:
“I speak to her still because she ends me tiny messages
from the grave, full of grief. My father smacked her
with a shovel after I said go ahead, she was drowning
on her own fluids. Try as I may, I cannot
picture my spine as a tube of loving light. I cannot
find the peace glowing like a flame or moon
in the forehead and then the chest. The next
scan will be fourteen minutes. I speak into the emergency
microphone: Please, set Ode to Joy at repeat.
This resistance to disappointing perspectives and their concluding comforts becomes clear in the poem ‘The Nearest Simile Is Respiration’ (to poetry), a piece that seems to most explicitly reveal what the speaker has come to as the nearest thing to a workable logic, to poetry as the mechanism of the kind of survival so many of the poems detail:
“...a reason
not to do me in. Proof I was more
than the season ragbag detritus
choking the rooftop gutters,
more than a piece of the cosmic dust
in some ruined philosophy.
I could not be consoled by the universal
Sisyphus in us all, the dung beetle
nuzzling its putrid globe.”
…
“With you, I forgive my father’s notes
to NASA, the self-inflicted swastika tattoo,
my sister’s coked-up juggernaut cannonball
into the afterlife.
“I forgive the afterlife...”
What ends up working so well in this recognition is the way it feels so anti-epiphanic; there’s nothing sudden here, no flashes of realization or 180-degree turns that reveal the world as so much brighter or full of meaning; poetry isn’t given these divine, universal qualities nor is it endowed with a healing presence so much as it is perceived as giving a language, literally and literarily to the introspection that has delivered the entire range of events of the book. The forgiveness of Capps’s speaker might on some level be a healing act but before that can even be part of the discussion its most immediate agency must be seen as that of survival and communication, even only internally, of whatever has transpired, and none of it has the faux ignorance of unsatisfying, contrived revelations, but rather the same sense of complicated, on-going process as the life that has given Capps these events.
The creative act itself is the endowing force, giving to Capps the authority of instructing meaning, or presenting a philosophy of her own liking in place of the any of the ‘ruined’ ones she feels have failed her. In this gesture we see the only answer Capps has available to the worries of mortality and loneliness, meaning and personal history, and an answer that in similar ways feels courageous to me in its frankness, in saying that whether it’s favorable or its logics make sense to anyone else, it remains her pervading language, not a decision in, metaphorically, the same way we don’t choose to breathe, but the only language or mode of existence she feels is left to her.
This overarching statement feels more genuine than any other, with the book itself working as its own proof, an artifact of Capps’s parsing out deep discourses on the fallible nature of humanity, both her own and others, alongside more quotidian observations, sigils seen along the roadside of the grind of one day in front of the next.
In the book’s titular poem, the honesty of Capps’s skepticism doesn’t leave even poetry from its broadening gaze, the implication in contemplating her sister’s death by drug overdose being perhaps that like the destructive comfort of a drug, even poetry’s ascribing of meaning as a false, if comforting truth, perhaps a ruined philosophy as well even if the one she must rely on:
“Like those sailors long ago,
that tropical disease, calenture--
when, far from everything they knew,
men grew sometimes delirious
and mistook the waving sea for green fields.
Rejoicing, they leapt overboard,
and so were lost forever,
even though they thought it was real, though
they thought they were going home.”
Even if it feels that things end up in a kind of nihilism, there's a lot to admire about that kind of acceptance--it bears repeating, the anti-epiphanic view--and more importantly I think a lot to admire in accepting that kind of relativity in meaning and language, the importance of whatever it is that gives one some kind of logic toward meaning, regardless of whether that logic might compute to anyone outside of your own head. Capps has handed us an astounding remnant of her internal work here, nothing of course that could resemble a whole product or record, but particular pieces of a kind of concentrated reflection on personal history, fear, death, and finding a way toward meaning, even if no objective meaning will ever make itself available; the power of this final idea is the heart of this book.
March 16, 2018
3.5 stars
I expected to like this more than I actually did, especially after reading the first few poems. It was an enjoyable read overall but, as I got further into it, my interest faded more and more. I still finished it, since it's a very short book, but I almost didn't want to after about 3/4ths of the way in.
Some of these poems are very good with profound statements. Some seem like uninteresting, disconnected, abstract thoughts separated into stanzas that had no real correlation to each other and failed to ascertain an emotional response from me. Most of these poems falls somewhere in the middle.
There are still some poems that I found to have abstract thoughts that were well-crafted and felt profound, felt powerful and actually made me feel something despite the fact that I didn't totally understand what it was trying to say. As long as poetry makes me feel something or seems profound in some way, I'm on board. That being said, I did have some sort of connection to most of the poems in this book, though not enough for me to praise it as this great, award-winning masterpiece.
I expected to like this more than I actually did, especially after reading the first few poems. It was an enjoyable read overall but, as I got further into it, my interest faded more and more. I still finished it, since it's a very short book, but I almost didn't want to after about 3/4ths of the way in.
Some of these poems are very good with profound statements. Some seem like uninteresting, disconnected, abstract thoughts separated into stanzas that had no real correlation to each other and failed to ascertain an emotional response from me. Most of these poems falls somewhere in the middle.
There are still some poems that I found to have abstract thoughts that were well-crafted and felt profound, felt powerful and actually made me feel something despite the fact that I didn't totally understand what it was trying to say. As long as poetry makes me feel something or seems profound in some way, I'm on board. That being said, I did have some sort of connection to most of the poems in this book, though not enough for me to praise it as this great, award-winning masterpiece.
December 1, 2024
A strong debut poetry collection. Not sure how I found this one or who recommended it to me, but I'm glad I picked it up. "The figs are heavy. // The little house of sticks / which I built for your son / has fallen down in the wind."
July 3, 2018
stars holding / the sky together like sutures
She prayed // for my sister to take the For Sale sign off / of her body and come home
She prayed // for my sister to take the For Sale sign off / of her body and come home
March 12, 2019
Not for me; or I just don’t understand Capp’s writings.
March 2, 2021
this book of poetry lives in my heart rent free. I think about it almost daily
December 23, 2010
We get told not to judge a book by its cover all the time. And yet every once in a while, don't you see a book whose cover, for no reason you can discern, jumps out at you and says, "read me, and I'll be the best book you read this year."? I can't remember who it was who originally recommended me Ashley Capps' Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields a couple of years ago, but I looked it up on Amazon, and there was that thumbnail, a childlike drawing of a boat on a green sea (I have since found out the artist is Claudia Hellmuth, and she has a book of her own out, and I must now get it immediately), and I heard that voice in my head. Time and the fickleness of my library system intervened, though, and I didn't actually get hold of the book until last week. And all this time, the cover has been nagging at the back of my mind, telling me how great the book is. With all that buildup, you kind of have to expect the book is somehow going to let you down. And then I finally picked the book up from the library, opened it up, and read "God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake", and knew that, if anything, the cover's ever-so-seductive voice had actually been understating the case.
"...1967, when she roped me to the pier,
when I was ten and she was drunk in her bikini
and wanted to watch the hurricane come in.
The green sky spun like an automated car wash!
Acorn barnacles oatmealed my back. A population
of lobsters blew past me like the rusty contents of a toolbox.
Dad took one look at my rope burns and punched her;
but Mom wore her bruises like high art, her broken
nose a study in cubism, blue flowers blooming
under her skin like watercolor...."
This minx is going to seduce you and break your heart at the same time. And it gets better when you get to the back of the book and read the Notes section, where Capps informs you (primly? grudgingly? pridefully? impossible to tell) that the poem is based not on her own childhood, but on her father's. In case you had any idea that such a thing might be fiction. Another of those old saws we've been hearing more often recently is that the truth is more important than the facts. I have always held it in disdain, but I've never seen a better argument for it than that passage. Or perhaps it's the opposite; here is a passage that shows the truth is the facts (which is, of course, self-evident), but that maybe we, in presenting them, should be dressing them up a bit more and taking them out on the town. "Acorn barnacles oatmealed my back." I read that line a dozen or so times over the course of a day, coming back and re-reading that poem over and over again as I kept going through this book, and marveling at how sound and image and surprising juxtaposition can come together in a way I haven't since I first discovered Guillaume Apollinaire.
There's no question this will top my Best reads of the Year list; did I mention that every other poem in this collection is as good as that one? I can usually find something to nitpick, but not this time. Even the rhymes snuck into free-verse poetry, a no-no by any standards, work here thanks to Capps being just that damned good with words. There's never a point where that particular schoolboy gaffe jars, and that amazes me to no end, as does everything else about this book. So, anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, book of the year, granted. Had I gotten to it last year, it would have been one of the books that was in such heated contention for Book of the Decade. Run, do not walk, to the bookstore. And then you'll probably have to special-order it, because 99% of all bookstores have crappy poetry sections that draw exclusively from big publishers rather than university presses. But it's worth the wait. Trust me on this. *****
"...1967, when she roped me to the pier,
when I was ten and she was drunk in her bikini
and wanted to watch the hurricane come in.
The green sky spun like an automated car wash!
Acorn barnacles oatmealed my back. A population
of lobsters blew past me like the rusty contents of a toolbox.
Dad took one look at my rope burns and punched her;
but Mom wore her bruises like high art, her broken
nose a study in cubism, blue flowers blooming
under her skin like watercolor...."
This minx is going to seduce you and break your heart at the same time. And it gets better when you get to the back of the book and read the Notes section, where Capps informs you (primly? grudgingly? pridefully? impossible to tell) that the poem is based not on her own childhood, but on her father's. In case you had any idea that such a thing might be fiction. Another of those old saws we've been hearing more often recently is that the truth is more important than the facts. I have always held it in disdain, but I've never seen a better argument for it than that passage. Or perhaps it's the opposite; here is a passage that shows the truth is the facts (which is, of course, self-evident), but that maybe we, in presenting them, should be dressing them up a bit more and taking them out on the town. "Acorn barnacles oatmealed my back." I read that line a dozen or so times over the course of a day, coming back and re-reading that poem over and over again as I kept going through this book, and marveling at how sound and image and surprising juxtaposition can come together in a way I haven't since I first discovered Guillaume Apollinaire.
There's no question this will top my Best reads of the Year list; did I mention that every other poem in this collection is as good as that one? I can usually find something to nitpick, but not this time. Even the rhymes snuck into free-verse poetry, a no-no by any standards, work here thanks to Capps being just that damned good with words. There's never a point where that particular schoolboy gaffe jars, and that amazes me to no end, as does everything else about this book. So, anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, book of the year, granted. Had I gotten to it last year, it would have been one of the books that was in such heated contention for Book of the Decade. Run, do not walk, to the bookstore. And then you'll probably have to special-order it, because 99% of all bookstores have crappy poetry sections that draw exclusively from big publishers rather than university presses. But it's worth the wait. Trust me on this. *****
June 17, 2013
This book takes us to a world that is violent and filled with loss. A world of dysfunction and disillusion, where edges are keen and soft things, like the sofa or a sister, get buried for no reason.
Born and raised in North Carolina, Ashley Capps might be classified as one of the modern Southern Gothic poets, like Andrew Hudgins,Maurice Manning, Sally Rosen Kindred.
Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields contains beauty and despair or perhaps the beauty of despair, as in the short poem "Porch"
I respect this work. Capps is a brilliant young poet and reading this book is well worth your time.
But while I respect the talent I have to say the book didn't really move me as it might have. I have looked into the heart of darkness, I've known violence and dysfunction, maybe even despair but my reading of these poems, which should have been visceral, remained intellectual.
Born and raised in North Carolina, Ashley Capps might be classified as one of the modern Southern Gothic poets, like Andrew Hudgins,Maurice Manning, Sally Rosen Kindred.
Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields contains beauty and despair or perhaps the beauty of despair, as in the short poem "Porch"
The diamonds had got in the roses again
I couldn't do anything
couldn't kill myself
couldn't know myself rightly
just sat in that rocker
all summer day . . .
I respect this work. Capps is a brilliant young poet and reading this book is well worth your time.
But while I respect the talent I have to say the book didn't really move me as it might have. I have looked into the heart of darkness, I've known violence and dysfunction, maybe even despair but my reading of these poems, which should have been visceral, remained intellectual.
March 17, 2008
Some of the poems in this book lift themselves up on their internal musical workings, like 'Gripes the Lover Leveled (Leaving)', which ends
I couldn't keep up with it --
too much tough for even this
your lame' samurai, your grunt, your glass
plug-ugly agonist.
Other poems breathe sadness into their form, like 'December', 'The Wedding', and 'All Night City Train'. And the book ends on a wonderful invitation to the reader with 'What Constitutes A Proper Planet' ('Till at last, one poked me with a stick and asked why I was doing that. / And I said, to keep the ocean out. And then they all joined in.') Overall, though, these poems feature moments of sharp and hungry language but don't sustain those moments for the duration. In other words, it's a first book, and definitely worth the read.
I couldn't keep up with it --
too much tough for even this
your lame' samurai, your grunt, your glass
plug-ugly agonist.
Other poems breathe sadness into their form, like 'December', 'The Wedding', and 'All Night City Train'. And the book ends on a wonderful invitation to the reader with 'What Constitutes A Proper Planet' ('Till at last, one poked me with a stick and asked why I was doing that. / And I said, to keep the ocean out. And then they all joined in.') Overall, though, these poems feature moments of sharp and hungry language but don't sustain those moments for the duration. In other words, it's a first book, and definitely worth the read.
April 3, 2008
Such a beautiful, wonderful, piercing, sad, uplifting, wondrous (is that enough adjectives?) collection of poetry.
I loved it. It stirred me. It made me feel like writing again. (which very little has done for a long, long time)
I fell head over heels for the first poem and it never let up from there -- devoured the entire collection in one sitting and went back for more.
I feel mute to express how fantastic this book is.
I loved it. It stirred me. It made me feel like writing again. (which very little has done for a long, long time)
I fell head over heels for the first poem and it never let up from there -- devoured the entire collection in one sitting and went back for more.
I feel mute to express how fantastic this book is.
February 3, 2008
This book is devastatingly sad, lonely, and funny all at once. I have rarely read poems that can achieve that kind of balance, but Capps does it deftly.
I am also amazed by the way she can make long (2-page) poems with long lines feel very small and compressed; it is as if when I read some of these longer poems, I am actually reading a small poem of Jean Valentine's (or someone similar).
I am also amazed by the way she can make long (2-page) poems with long lines feel very small and compressed; it is as if when I read some of these longer poems, I am actually reading a small poem of Jean Valentine's (or someone similar).
January 7, 2009
This poet is pretty amazing. I can't believe how young she was when she wrote this. I really couldn't put this book down and had to show it to several people before I returned it to the library. I plan on purchasing a copy for my poetry shelves next paycheck. I'll be watching you, Ashley Capps! I look forward to another book.
January 4, 2010
from Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields
April
Everywhere, the ghost
wigs of dandelions,
everywhere the green
toothache of early spring.
The cops-in-training
are beating their horses,
and they wave at me
from the fields. All the girls
show their shoulders now.
The future promises more
of the same. It is hard
to love people enough.
June 19, 2014
This is such a fine first collection, I am surprised it isn't more well known than it is. Capps is a youngish writer who writes sometimes droll, sometimes incredibly pointed, poetry full of remarkable images, an acute feel for alliteration and other sonic devices, and what's best is that she's not full of herself. Highly recommended.
December 29, 2007
This is not a 2-star book... what was I thinking!?! I read a few poems from it tonight--it's incredible. Okay, I'm rereading it over break.
Yes, a great book! I really enjoyed it. Fun and smart. Gotta reread it again soon!
Yes, a great book! I really enjoyed it. Fun and smart. Gotta reread it again soon!
April 16, 2013
I'm amazed by this collection. Whenever I need inspiration, I turn to Capp's book and immerse myself in her work. The words that flow from her fingers are incredible, and the metaphors she employs are flawless.
May 23, 2008
Re-read (again) this book, because I so love and need this book. Ah!!!
August 15, 2008
Really, a 4.5. What can I do? I've gotta work with what I have.
March 17, 2009
One of the best books of poetry I've read for a long time...I thought it was practically perfect.
Read
October 9, 2009Mistaking The Sea For Green Fields (Akron Series in Poetry) by Ashley Capps (2006)
March 3, 2011
My favorite book of poetry EVER!
February 16, 2015
More human than most of us allow ourselves to be.
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