Sunflower Facing the Sun (Iowa Poetry Prize)
Sunflower Facing the Sun (Iowa Poetry Prize) by Greg Pape
English | Sep. 1, 1992 | ISBN: 0877453829 | 100 Pages | PDF | 1 MB
English | Sep. 1, 1992 | ISBN: 0877453829 | 100 Pages | PDF | 1 MB
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.