American Flamingo Poems by Greg Pape March paper, 0-8093-2622-1, $14.95 cloth, 0-8093-2621-3, 27.50 96 pages, 6 x 9 Poetry / Crab Orchard Series in Poetry   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. “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   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.   Idling Sitting on the seawall at the southern end of Key Biscayne, with a line in the water, he moves his gaze like a sable brush from the breast of an idling gull to the weathered gray wood of the houses on stilts out in the bay, from the long swaying branches of Australian pines that will blow away in the next hurricane to the endangered coral rocks and white sands that turn the blue of the sky to the blue green of the bay, from the spiny rock lobsters (for the taking of which may result in fines and imprisonment) to the horse conches (also illegal), from the long white expensive boats to the rainbowed fabric of sails, from the flashing towers and banked glass facades of vacant condominiums to the stuttering path of a police helicopter, unsure if he’s guilty or innocent, feeling the pull of local currents and solunar tides, he holds his line, lightly, between forefinger and thumb, not to keep from falling, believing falling is half the secret, but to feel the tug of the other half when it comes for its prey.

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