Mistaking The Sea For Green Fields (Akron Series in Poetry)

In her first book, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, Ashley Capps sounds like the voice of a fresh generation of poets, where the familiar turns suddenly elliptical, straight talk goes engagingly crooked, and the lyric negotiates with the matter-of-fact. Desperate for something solid to believe in, Capps still mistrusts authority, feeling disenchanted with God, family, eros, even her own impulsive self. And yet while the absence of faith hints at despair, these poems often achieve, almost inspite of themselves, an odd buoyancy. Playful, fearless, wary, there's a dazzling resilience in this book. One poem can make a grand and eccentric claim, "I forgive the afterlife," while another takes as its title something humbler and more poisonous, "God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake." No matter how adrift this poet may feel, poetry itself remains her anchor and lifeline.

Ashley Capps, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields (University of Akron Press, 2006)

We get told not to judge a book by its cover all the time. And yet every once in a while, don't you see a book whose cover, for no reason you can discern, jumps out at you and says, "read me, and I'll be the best book you read this year."? I can't remember who it was who originally recommended me Ashley Capps' Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields a couple of years ago, but I looked it up on Amazon, and there was that thumbnail, a childlike drawing of a boat on a green sea (I have since found out the artist is Claudia Hellmuth, and she has a book of her own out, and I must now get it immediately), and I heard that voice in my head. Time and the fickleness of my library system intervened, though, and I didn't actually get hold of the book until last week. And all this time, the cover has been nagging at the back of my mind, telling me how great the book is. With all that buildup, you kind of have to expect the book is somehow going to let you down. And then I finally picked the book up from the library, opened it up, and read "God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake", and knew that, if anything, the cover's ever-so-seductive voice had actually been understating the case.

"...1967, when she roped me to the pier,

when I was ten and she was drunk in her bikini

and wanted to watch the hurricane come in.

The green sky spun like an automated car wash!

Acorn barnacles oatmealed my back. A population

of lobsters blew past me like the rusty contents of a toolbox.

Dad took one look at my rope burns and punched her;

but Mom wore her bruises like high art, her broken

nose a study in cubism, blue flowers blooming

under her skin like watercolor...."

This minx is going to seduce you and break your heart at the same time. And it gets better when you get to the back of the book and read the Notes section, where Capps informs you (primly? grudgingly? pridefully? impossible to tell) that the poem is based not on her own childhood, but on her father's. In case you had any idea that such a thing might be fiction. Another of those old saws we've been hearing more often recently is that the truth is more important than the facts. I have always held it in disdain, but I've never seen a better argument for it than that passage. Or perhaps it's the opposite; here is a passage that shows the truth is the facts (which is, of course, self-evident), but that maybe we, in presenting them, should be dressing them up a bit more and taking them out on the town. "Acorn barnacles oatmealed my back." I read that line a dozen or so times over the course of a day, coming back and re-reading that poem over and over again as I kept going through this book, and marveling at how sound and image and surprising juxtaposition can come together in a way I haven't since I first discovered Guillaume Apollinaire.

There's no question this will top my Best reads of the Year list; did I mention that every other poem in this collection is as good as that one? I can usually find something to nitpick, but not this time. Even the rhymes snuck into free-verse poetry, a no-no by any standards, work here thanks to Capps being just that damned good with words. There's never a point where that particular schoolboy gaffe jars, and that amazes me to no end, as does everything else about this book. So, anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, book of the year, granted. Had I gotten to it last year, it would have been one of the books that was in such heated contention for Book of the Decade. Run, do not walk, to the bookstore. And then you'll probably have to special-order it, because 99% of all bookstores have crappy poetry sections that draw exclusively from big publishers rather than university presses. But it's worth the wait. Trust me on this. *****

I was lucky to read some excerpts from this collection on the internet earlier this year. After reading some of her poetry I knew I had to get this book for myself. I am so glad I did. I have committed the first poem "Hymn for Two Choirs" to memory. Everytime I say it aloud it leaves me with a sense of hope that I can't put into words. It is rare that I come across a poem I like so much. The entire collection is a work of art. Oftentimes I carry this collection with me in my purse. I have read it through several times. I will be looking for her next book for sure. If you buy one book this year, buy this. I can't recommend it enough.

When I was young I liked to write messages, put them in bottles and then toss them in the river behind my house. In a not un-similiar but somewhat reverse spirit I like to pick up a book of poems now and then. I would recommend burning through this book, then going back and re-reading the ones that seemed to speak most directly to you. Here's to a very successful, intelligent, first book by Ashley Capps. I'm very glad I found it.

"I'm stunned by this poetry. Tried to write something to describe it, but it all sounded pompous and wrong. Just about everything I thought might not work here works;

everything that works is sublime.

I've already started to order copies for friends.

Read this poetry.

but lightning.

I first found these poems through "I Used to See Her in the Field Beside My House"--a poem, quite bravely, about a cow. But that poem--that hokey, pastoral thing you had in mind evaporates when you begin Capps "cow poem"

with the lines:

Perhaps it is the way your nipples,

long like fingers on an open hand,

and when the poem reaches its conclusion with a call to the

Cow, listen--forget the deep pools

of rain that pock the lit, green land-

scape of your youth. Forget the singing

man who rubbed your head. He's readying the rape rack...

until finally the killing concluding line:

Old girl, there is nothing

in this world that loves you back.

Then you really know you're dealing with a different beast entirely here. These poems dare and make good. They CPR the tired lungs of the poems you always wish they weren't and they aren't. What they are is electric, all alacrity and no wasted breath. (Which reminds me: Do not miss "The Nearest Simile is Respiration.")

These poems are on their way--with or without you, Reader. Where they're going, (on every single line) is where you want to be.

You saw it. You

were there--

that enormous claw, dangling

like a polite, ridiculous teacup.

No poem disappoints. Buy it. Read it. Quote it. Capps is for real.