“Because he has shaken/a dream of dead birds/and rises without amends/and returns to a state of grace” opens Greg Rappleye's poem “Cat Descending a Staircase,” and in a way, these first four lines mirror the spirits of the other works found in Rappleye's collection from 2000, A Path Between Houses, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. This collection, a winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, concerns largely these metaphorical dreams of dead birds—loss of sanity, loss of love, the rigors of addiction—and how the narrator resolves to overcome them. Along with covering the geography of human imbalance, the poems in A Path Between Houses cover literal geography from the Gulf of Mexico to Jackson, Michigan—the poetry speaks in a language that is at once common and engaging, yet rooted in imagery and place.
The firm grasp of earth that these poems contain is evident in the poem “Bone Island in Summer.” Lines like “The redolence of orchids/settles over the asphalt/and the blackbirds scream at us/from the banyan trees” string us into the setting, allowing for the poem to take us where “a tropical depression/staggers through the Leeward Islands,” and we are there, caught in the last-lines' storm “as the seaplanes fall through the spires/of the Star of the Sea Church,/like spirits driven from heaven,/finding a place to land.” Greg Rappleye utilizes these vivid descriptions to establish a history, an emotional credence, that allows the poem to open up and really delivery with these final four lines. It knocks you back, and the unspoken words strike a nerve.
It is this speechlessness, a breathlessness, that purveys through many of A Path Between Houses' poems. In “At Forty-Seven Days” we are made aware of the narrator's alcohol use (or lack there-of), but as the poem extends into the description of the fishing the narrator's doing, the reader almost forgets the problems the narrator has, as perhaps the narrator forgets them a bit also, and watches “the salmon at full run, deeply hooked, /a violent flash of plum and darkling silver,/slashing across light and stones.” But the problems don't go away so easily—Rappleye's wonderful distractions fall away, and while it's not a surprise, this reader cannot help but react when this one reaches its end.
But where “At Forty-Seven Days” ends wearyingly, “Porpoise”— another poem about drinking and aquatic-life—has the narrator visiting a porpoise, feeding her and conversing with her. The narrator then slips in the water with her, and despite his state, the porpoise was welcoming, and the poem ends with the porpoise pushing the tired narrator back to the dock. He did not kill and eat this fish, but instead the porpoise seemed to recognize his struggle, both internally and externally. This poem acts as a sister to “At Forty-Seven Days” by displaying a different outcome—instead of the narrator triumphing and feeling alone, he is left weak but in touch with something other than himself.
Greg Rappleye's writing is visceral and gripping, full of vivid sensory-fulfilling description, but more importantly it is full of truth—whether it's poems of fishing stories, a sprawling piece on the Rat Pack in Vegas, or anything in between. A Path Between Houses is a collection unafraid of the rough edges of human life—the addictions, the losses, the loneliness—and trying to cope and move on, even if you don't really know how.