Habitat offers an opportunity to trace a remarkable poetic career. In their richly various shapes, colors, textures, and strategies, Galvin’s poems bear witness to matters both joyful and intractable.
Full of noose-around-the-neck wisecracks,
you’d have been an unwilling toiler,
envying the horse its stamina,
the hare its jagged speed over broken
fields, and bog cotton its deference to wind
on peatlands against blue mountains,
where it crowds white-headed
as ancient peasants herded off the best
grazing, enduring as if they’d do better
as plants hoarding minerals through winter,
hairy prodigals spinning existence from clouds,
from mistfall two days out of three, the odd
shoal of sun drifting across.
—from "A Neolithic Meditation"
"Galvin would like us to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel the world that is always there, moment by simple moment, a world replete with epiphanies of the commonplace, various kinds of clarifications and gifts, gifts that too often go unnoticed. . . . Galvin is at the top of his form, still going strong."—Peter Makuck, Laurel Review
