Greg Rappleye s Figured Dark is a collection of contemporary lyric and narrative poems, set in an American landscape, which takes as its implicit theme the journey of the soul from darkness into light.

The voices in the collection call across a vast landscape of myth, memory, and horrific wreckage. In the title poem, speaking of the phenomenon of fireflies rising at night from a southern field, he writes, I could read this down to a million tiny bodies, / blazing the midnight trees, but the reader is left to wonder whether any extravagant numbering can account for the massed...