Greg Pape is the author of A Field of First Things, 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, where he taught writing from 1987 to 2016, and former Montana Poet Laureate (2007 to 2009). He currently serves on the faculty in Spalding University’s Naslund–Mann School of Writing.
A Field of First Things
In A Field of First Things, you can read some of Greg Pape's best work, featuring narrative poems of beauty, compassion and introspection, as well as poems addressing the complex interdependence between humans and the natural world.
On A Field of First Things by Greg Pape:
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
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