A Field of First Things

Poetry November 2023 ISBN 978-1-961127-01-2 120 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

In A Field of First Things, you can read some of Greg Pape's best work, featuring narrative poems of beauty and compassion, poems addressing the complex interdependence between humans and the natural world.

"From Captiva Island's dock to a shared deep dive into Moby Dick, to the crashing waves in the South Bay, to a pool of mountain water, Greg Pape transports the reader across liquid time. Imbued with the trust of a loyal dog, we ride along like Lulu, marveling at Sandhill cranes and bucks in the Bitterroots, stare out at wide open mysterious desert nights and back into the still wet lives of people who have earned their venerable places in a constellation of shimmering memories. A Field of First Things allows the reader to experience the full power of a master poet who carries us willingly along on a journey where we are at once the ocean and the whale. And we all rise to the surface better for it."—Frank X Walker

From the Book

Dick Dale & The Del-Tones

Do you remember Dick Dale & The Del-Tones?
Probably not. You could google them.
They played at the Rendezvous Ballroom
lost Saturday nights on Balboa Island.
A left-handed lead guitar, a drummer
who loved to crash the cymbals, a rhythm guitar
and bass who made the floorboards bounce.
Let's Go Trippin' was the surfer's anthem
years before Good Vibrations and the Summer
of Love. We'd drive down Pacific Coast Highway
and slip in among the crowds and dance
until 2 am when they'd flash the lights
and we'd have to leave. Exhausted
we'd fall asleep in the back seat of someone's car
in the parking lot, and wake at dawn to the sound
of surf, pounding surf if we were lucky,
shoulder- or head-high waves we'd ride for hours
as if that was our very reason for being,
as if that was what we were born for.

What Others Say

Greg Pape's poems have long been touchstones of wisdom and clear-eyed seeing, and this new book confirms his place as one of our essential poets of the natural world, a rare and true inhabitant, here for the duration.

— Chris Dombrowski , author of The River You Touch

There is a profusion of sublime recognitions in this, the latest of Greg Pape's numerous collections that is perhaps the capstone to his fine career as a poet. As a child of California myself, I see deeply into his poems of recollection set in South Bay Los Angeles, Redondo Beach pier, fields of agricultural bounty in Fresno, set also among teen surfers, youthful hippies, and nighthawks in diners up and down the coast. But Pape's travels range farther—into the Florida Keys, Montana and throughout the West, even to Rome. Throughout, I recognize his compassionate portraits of the working poor, fellow field workers in California's Central Valley, young firefighters in the Sierras, indigenous kids playing basketball in Arizona, and an homage to a North Beach stripper. Heart is at the center of all this, "a tenderness towards existence," as Rilke recommended, and he gives it even to a deer trapped in a snare. to a porcupine, sandhill cranes, mariposas, hummingbirds, a flamingo, and a pet dog named Keats. And there are allusions galore to his studies in literature and classical American rock'n roll from Melville to T'ao Ch'ien, Whitman to the Sons of Champlin. We share much of these crossings of human feeling—the admiration for those who struggle and lose, who triumph and lose, who love and lose that too. His book is a furling face of the mounting wave of his entire life, the sweep of a fine and articulate nature, its torque of fulminating emotions, and the sweet foam of joy with its glister of gladness even in the troughs of sorrow. Greg Pape is my kinsman and brother, myself made otherwise by all his wisdom.

— Garrett Hongo , author of The Perfect Sound

From Captiva Island's dock to a shared deep dive into Moby Dick, to the crashing waves in the South Bay, to a pool of mountain water, Greg Pape transports the reader across liquid time. Imbued with the trust of a loyal dog, we ride along like Lulu, marveling at Sandhill cranes and bucks in the Bitterroots, stare out at wide open mysterious desert nights and back into the still wet lives of people who have earned their venerable places in a constellation of shimmering memories. A Field of First Things allows the reader to experience the full power of a master poet who carries us willingly along on a journey where we are at once the ocean and the whale. And we all rise to the surface better for it.

— Frank X Walker , author of Masked Man, Black

Moving with the sure steps of Levertov's dog in "Overland to the Islands," in A Field of First Things, Greg Pape waves to Melville and Dante, Wordsworth and Frost, Whitman and T'ao Ch'ien. "Miracles / and catastrophes abound, and in childhood / they take on an especially personal tone," Pape tells us, and these poems are, indeed, haunted by experiences the younger self did not have words for—one, in particular, when a beloved collie is left behind and "that first heaven of contentment collapsed." Written by a poet who came of age under the twinned shadows of The Bomb and large-scale clear cutting, "Road Trip with Lulu," a marvelous long poem featuring an aging black retriever as co-pilot, is a gravitational field for the poems in this remarkable book that is most of all a songline for feeling one's way in the world.

— Debra Kang Dean , author of Totem: America

About the Author

Greg Pape

Greg Pape is the author of Four Swans, Animal Time, American Flamingo (Crab Orchard Open Competition Award), Sunflower Facing the Sun (Edwin Ford Piper Prize, now called the Iowa Prize), Storm Pattern, Black Branches, Border Crossings (Pitt Poetry Series), and other books. His work has received the Discovery/The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and other awards. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Colorado Review, Cutbank, Field, The Florida Review, Iowa Review, Literary Accents, The Louisville Review, Miramar, The New Yorker, Poetry, Kyoto Journal, and others. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Montana and former Montana Poet Laureate. He currently serves on the faculty in Spalding University's Naslund-Mann School of Writing. He has an MFA degree from the University of Arizona and an M.A. from California State University, Fresno. Born in California, Greg Pape has lived and worked in many places around the country. He has taught literature and writing at Hollins University, The University of Missouri, The University of Alabama, where he served as The Coal Royalty Chair in poetry, The University of Louisville, where he served as Bingham Poet-in-Residence, Northern Arizona University, Florida International University, and other colleges and universities. He has been awarded fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Centrum Foundation at Fort Worden State Park in Washington, and Breadloaf, where was a Robert Frost Fellow. He has read his work at venues across the country and in Canada, Mexico, Italy, and Japan. His poetry reflects a deep appreciation for diverse landscapes and people, a love of animals, and an attentiveness to the natural world, which of course includes the man-made world. He divides his time between Frankfort, Kentucky and the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. He is currently at work on a new book of poems and a memoir.