Barley Child

Barley Child, Greg Rappleyes fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American livesrecalled, 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 choirmale and female, child and adult, Irish and Americantheir 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.