SPOTLIGHT: Greg Rappleye, lawyer/poet
IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Greg Rappleye, lawyer/poet, who lives in, of all places (after the crazy football news this week) — Michigan. Near beautiful Grand Haven, Michigan.
Besides being from a state that has stolen two of our coaches, — “Sorry about that,” he says — there are other, more poetry-direct links to W.Va.: his chapbooks, “The Afterlight,” out in 2006 from WVU-Legal Studies Forum, and another one forthcoming from the Forum in 2008.
Rappleye also has three full-length collections of poetry: “Holding Down the Earth” (Sky Books, 1995), “A Path Between Houses” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), and “Figured Dark” (University of Arkansas Press, 2007).
Click here for a sample poem, “After the Divorce,” from “Figured Dark.”
Sample blurb about Rappleye from uapress.com: “Oh the fine, brawling, pungent observation of these poems: ‘the smog-brown sea,’ ‘the baggies-drooping sea’; Homer would be exhilarated and appalled. Greg Rappleye revives the language and revives our powers of seeing. Figured Dark is shot through with light.”
—Linda Gregerson, author of “Waterborne” and “Magnetic North”
Rappleye in one of his blog posts: “My work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Review Literary Award in Poetry, and the Arts & Letters Prize. I was a Bread Loaf Fellow in 2002. When not writing, I work full-time as corporation counsel for a local government and also teach part-time in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.”
Check out Rappleye’s blog: sonnets at 4 a.m.
Enjoy.
