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94 pages, 1992
$16.00 paper 0-87745-382-9, 978-0-87745-382-6
“Greg Pape is a poet who is engaged in the world and makes that world alive and profound. His is a wholly original vision—whether looking at a jackrabbit in the landscape or listening to an adequate musician in a dark bar—he finds the right words to illuminate. Sunflower Facing the Sun is a fine book of poems.”—James Welch
“In Sunflower Facing the Sun Greg Pape shows himself to be a poet of joy as well as of sorrow, turning from the human to the natural world and back again, refreshed, rejoined, learning to raise his voice in well-earned blessing, here for the duration.”—Edward Hirsch
“Pape's new book marks both a refinement of the themes of his earlier work and an expansion into uncharted territory. His poems travel with the familiarity of a veteran of many miles. And Pape is an experienced guide, with an eye for the telling detail and an ear for the music of the road, the song of the journey.”—Bloomsbury Review
Cows
Build a world of cows
and see where it gets you.
My cows, really my neighbor's cows,
move through the day like worlds
unto themselves. Between the fences
they revolve, between night and day
they stand. They stand for the ground
they stand on, they stand for the grass,
green or burned, alive or the sturdy husks
of lives. They stand for the air, the sky,
the weather that shows no mercy.
Over the fields, down the hill to the gully,
up the hill to the hill, they drift like clouds.
They lie down in the sun, suggesting,
at a distance, the first rocks
that came to rest. These cows
stand for the world we build,
and though we see daily the terror
of where we're going, we say more more
like the cows who are, like us,
between the seeds and the flames, a truce.
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