Barley Child: Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Autor Greg Rappleyeen Limba Engleză Paperback – 3 mar 2025
Finalist, 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize
Barley Child, Greg Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir—male and female, child and adult, Irish and American—their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism.
Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that seldom mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Greg Rappleye as a poet of witness.
![[explicit lyrics]: Poems](https://i0.books-express.ro/bs/9781557286956/explicit-lyrics.jpg)
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781682262696
ISBN-10: 1682262693
Pagini: 144
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.2 kg
Editura: University of Arkansas Press
Colecția University of Arkansas Press
Seria Miller Williams Poetry Prize
ISBN-10: 1682262693
Pagini: 144
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.2 kg
Editura: University of Arkansas Press
Colecția University of Arkansas Press
Seria Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Recenzii
“Like the characters in all the best poetry collections—and this is one of those—the people who inhabit the ‘blown-gasket town’ depicted here are utterly different from you and me and also exactly like us. How is this possible? Through Greg Rappleye’s unfailing artistry.”
—David Kirby, author of The House on Boulevard St.
“Greg Rappleye welds a poet’s ear for cadence and music to a novelist’s eye for detail, opening up for us a Hiberno-inflected Americana. Here in controlled diction, deployed for dizzying effect, we find lives without privilege, lives of stratified emotion layered upon a cornucopia of plant life, urban bric-a-brac, and mid-twentieth-century cultural artifacts. Rappleye paints for us a portrait of a time which is no more, but which can never fade completely while recorded by his precise language.”
—Patrick Cotter, author of Sonic White Poise
“Barley Child is a collection so vividly imagined and so beautifully written that one hesitates to read the final poem, not wanting the spell to end.”
—Julie Kane, author of Mothers of Ireland
“Roots, dirt, smudges, crops: Rappleye is very interested in all these things, it turns out. In this, his fifth collection, Rappleye sings the songs of the lost, the people and places that have been forgotten, or deliberately set aside, by the successful and sophisticated. This volume explores the places most of us try to avoid even thinking about-sanitariums and mental hospitals, worn-out factories, infirmity wards, quarries, cheap assisted living homes. The poems tell the stories of people we don’t know what to do with, from alcoholics to tuberculosis patients, from suspected arsonists and rural lunatics to tasteless tourists and dementia victims and bastards and the unborn, all the people who thrust their frailty before our eyes and force us to confront the reality that no one is truly whole. … Rappleye’s collection is a mesmerizing catalogue of the miscreants and underdogs of the world. Despite its Irish roots, Barley Child has a distinctly Midwestern flavor and stands as a tribute to this economically depressed yet curiously fecund region. Rappleye here has given us poetry that, by sinking deep into the details of a specific time and place, wrests from that muck a universality that transforms these little narratives into hymns of the human experience. We are all, it turns out, barley children, every one of us born out of time and marked forever by our strange and scandalous heritage.”
—J.C. Scharl, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, 2026
“[A] richly imagined and lyrically presented record of the Irish American experience from the pen of someone who knows, who can reliably summon up both its reality and its spirit. … Barley Child (a term, by the way, that once suggested illegitimacy and maybe even the scene of conception) shows the poet reflecting on official documents, gravestone epitaphs, faded photographs and the like, to conjure up a feeling for a certain breed, a class apart.”
—Robert Dunsdon, Colorado Review, August 2025
—David Kirby, author of The House on Boulevard St.
“Greg Rappleye welds a poet’s ear for cadence and music to a novelist’s eye for detail, opening up for us a Hiberno-inflected Americana. Here in controlled diction, deployed for dizzying effect, we find lives without privilege, lives of stratified emotion layered upon a cornucopia of plant life, urban bric-a-brac, and mid-twentieth-century cultural artifacts. Rappleye paints for us a portrait of a time which is no more, but which can never fade completely while recorded by his precise language.”
—Patrick Cotter, author of Sonic White Poise
“Barley Child is a collection so vividly imagined and so beautifully written that one hesitates to read the final poem, not wanting the spell to end.”
—Julie Kane, author of Mothers of Ireland
“Roots, dirt, smudges, crops: Rappleye is very interested in all these things, it turns out. In this, his fifth collection, Rappleye sings the songs of the lost, the people and places that have been forgotten, or deliberately set aside, by the successful and sophisticated. This volume explores the places most of us try to avoid even thinking about-sanitariums and mental hospitals, worn-out factories, infirmity wards, quarries, cheap assisted living homes. The poems tell the stories of people we don’t know what to do with, from alcoholics to tuberculosis patients, from suspected arsonists and rural lunatics to tasteless tourists and dementia victims and bastards and the unborn, all the people who thrust their frailty before our eyes and force us to confront the reality that no one is truly whole. … Rappleye’s collection is a mesmerizing catalogue of the miscreants and underdogs of the world. Despite its Irish roots, Barley Child has a distinctly Midwestern flavor and stands as a tribute to this economically depressed yet curiously fecund region. Rappleye here has given us poetry that, by sinking deep into the details of a specific time and place, wrests from that muck a universality that transforms these little narratives into hymns of the human experience. We are all, it turns out, barley children, every one of us born out of time and marked forever by our strange and scandalous heritage.”
—J.C. Scharl, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, 2026
“[A] richly imagined and lyrically presented record of the Irish American experience from the pen of someone who knows, who can reliably summon up both its reality and its spirit. … Barley Child (a term, by the way, that once suggested illegitimacy and maybe even the scene of conception) shows the poet reflecting on official documents, gravestone epitaphs, faded photographs and the like, to conjure up a feeling for a certain breed, a class apart.”
—Robert Dunsdon, Colorado Review, August 2025
Notă biografică
Greg Rappleye is the author of A Path Between Houses, Figured Dark, and Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds, and is a former Bread Loaf Fellow in Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry,the Southern Review,the North American Review, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the English department at Hope College in Michigan.