Essay: Good reading: "Figured Dark"

The book is Figured Dark by my friend Greg Rappleye of Grand Haven out this fall from the University of Arkansas. These are poems of winter darkness, but they also deliver poignant humor and hope.

Perhaps because New Year's Day and its desperate celebrations are just barely receding, this morning I'm especially struck by the ghostly:

At the Museum of Whiskey History

I find my dead, sneaking shots of Old Crow

behind a blind pig . . .

And by the poignant My Mother Thinks She's Peggy Lee in which a plucky child, trying to entertain his mother, pretends to be Arthur Godfrey and Art Linkletter, over TV trays and SpaghettiOs. He introduces a "scabby little cat" and "our next guest " my baby sister!" as the mother, drunk on Asti and orange juice, falls asleep on the couch.

I'm touched by After the Divorce, in which the speaker bleakly ends,

Winter soon

my home.

And I'm especially moved by Rappleye's Lost-Love Ghazals in which, after plowing respectfully and mournfully through the repeating form, he plaintively rejects the rules:

Why bury my name in some final couplet?

Bereft of name, I will not love you anymore.

"No elegies," he writes in the elegiac After the Diagnosis:

This winter is just one more darkness

we must learn to walk through.

Rich rewards await the reader in this powerful collection, compelling in its considerations of the folie a deux of suffering and celebration.

To quote one of the book - best poems, Greg, 'You paid for this,' whatever happiness is."

Jan's book, Night Blind, is available at Barnes & Noble in Genesee Valley, UM-Flint Bookstore, East End Books and Music at the Farmers' Market, Pages Bookstore, Little Professor Book Center in Fenton, www.Amazon.com, www.Bn.com and www.iuniverse.com.