Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds

Poetry. Art. "Greg Rappleye is a poet of exquisite, lush language, exacting and precise in description, inventive in the re-creation of entire worlds. In this intoxicating and revelatory journey through the Brazilian rain forests of the 19th century, he populates the canvas of his poems with not only the flora and fauna of that time and place, but with the voice and inimitable perspective of its subject: Martin Johnson Heade, an American painter obsessed with the otherworldly appearance and flight of hummingbirds. As Rappleye's imagined Heade confesses, '[I] walk for days to find their tiny hearts / beating in the jungle dark.' Yet for all its meticulous research, the heart of this book is a meditation on connection, on what we willingly give our lives over to. As the poet asks, 'What should we save- / a fallen world, or the life we are finally given to live?'"--Todd Davis