Barley Child

Barley Child, Greg Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American lives-recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir-male and female, child and adult, Irish and American-their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism.

Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that seldom mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Greg Rappleye as a poet of witness.

Greg Rappleye is the author of A Path Between Houses, Figured Dark, and Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds, and is a former Bread Loaf Fellow in Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, the Southern Review, the North American Review, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the English department at Hope College in Michigan.