American Flamingo

by Greg Pape

Overview

Taking its title from an Audubon painting, American Flamingo shares with the artist an exquisite attention to detail and the suggestion of a larger sense of time and place through depictions of the intimate interactions between creatures and their habitats. In his fifth collection of poetry, Greg Pape melds memorable images from the natural world with the drama of ordinary experience to capture small transformations of human character in American settings from Arizona’s Sonora Desert to the icy streets of Washington, D.C. Through elegies, character sketches, and lyric and narrative evocations of family and place, Pape offers lucid and startling poems that bridge the spaces between the past and the present, men and women, and urban and rural landscapes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809326228
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/07/2005
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	102
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Greg Pape’s books include Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern, and Sunflower Facing the Sun. His poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, Colorado Review, Missouri Review, and numerous other publications. The recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award, he teaches in the writing program at the University of Montana and in the brief-residency program at Spalding University. He lives with his family in the Bitterroot Valley.

Editorial Reviews

You want to be the poet’s friend, because he makes you cry and laugh, to share his shadow and nuanced eye as he bends above a small spider that walks inside the snow track of a deer—within the shadow of the poet, that spider pauses. In the manner of James Wright and Horace before him, Greg Pape celebrates the delicate and daily exchange living beings make with each other. This is a beautifully compassionate book.”—Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature



“My happiness is the poetry of Greg Pape. He’s Lorca’s demon in Frisco Jeans and a Chino shirt, praying on a Tejano squeezebox a poet of work and cantinas, love of place and family, and a spirit that redeems all sorrow in its plenitude. I can as easily do without Greg Pape’s poems as the high deserts and mountains of which he writes can do without rain and lightning. His American Flamingo is pure splendor.”—Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano

From the Publisher