From Publishers Weekly
Like many contemporary lyric poets, Pape ( Border Crossings ) has found his material under the harsh neon light of motels, highways and hospital birth rooms as well as in the shadows of wilderness that harbors boreal owls, white tail deer, boars and piglets. The disjunction between these two worlds, "the warm soft air / that smells of exhaust and the Pacific," has become rather hackneyed as a theme in American poetry, where the writing process involves a hybrid variety of romantic meditation ("I sit / at the desk waiting for the spirit / to move me"). These are direct poems written, for the most part, in stanzas of free verse with little diversity of rhythm or play with sound. The voice, uncomplicated, seemingly sincere, predictably finds irony in urban settings and release within nature. The title for the volume is taken from a poem in which the speaker imagines a woman who is about to give birth: as a sunflower drawn to the sun, she is "for better or for worse, here for the duration." The persona Pape invents, as in most of the poems, is likable, generous, basically unconflicted, though not strikingly original.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
These poems, which shared the University of Iowa's Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Prize in 1991, pay their respects, at times passionately, to nature and the environment, motherhood and childbirth, our Native American predecessors, and working-class lives and working-class bars. Pape is a prolific writer; one feels that he makes poems out of every square inch of his life and that he has a very pleasant life indeed, much of it spent fishing the Bitterroot near Missoula, where he teaches creative writing. But pleasant isn't enough; from poem to poem, Pape's line threatens to degenerate into an enervated prose, and the occasional spicy images that keep the reader awake--for example, "the No Tell Motel anchored to the desert/ with cement, a small idea that hardens"--grow sparser. The book never seems to take off. For public and academic collections with a regional interest.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
