Sunflower Facing the Sun: Poems

Like many contemporary lyric poets, Pape ( Border Crossings ) has found his material under the harsh neon light of motels, highways and hospital birth rooms as well as in the shadows of wilderness that harbors boreal owls, white tail deer, boars and piglets. The disjunction between these two worlds, ``the warm soft air / that smells of exhaust and the Pacific,'' has become rather hackneyed as a theme in American poetry, where the writing process involves a hybrid variety of romantic meditation (``I sit / at the desk waiting for the spirit / to move me''). These are direct poems written, for the most part, in stanzas of free verse with little diversity of rhythm or play with sound. The voice, uncomplicated, seemingly sincere, predictably finds irony in urban settings and release within nature. The title for the volume is taken from a poem in which the speaker imagines a woman who is about to give birth: as a sunflower drawn to the sun, she is ``for better or for worse, here for the duration.'' The persona Pape invents, as in most of the poems, is likable, generous, basically unconflicted, though not strikingly original. (Sept.)