Ocean Effects: Poems [Paperback]

Brendan Galvin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2007

Sharply observed and metaphorically inventive, Ocean Effects is a worthy follow-up to Galvin's National Book Award finalist Habitat. It includes a new vein of Galvin's trademark richly observed lyric poems on the biota, landscapes, and weathers of coastal New England. Seascapes and the natural world bracket sequences spoken by personae as various as the seventeenth-century American colonist Roger Williams, small-town cops, a squatter in the ruins of Chernobyl, a nineteenth-century Russian general in Mongolia, and a Cape Cod carpenter. Galvin's monologues, tensile and energetic free verse, are touched with the speech of the historical periods in which they take place.

the surface was too hugely roiled
for a muskrat's dive or a shag's,
it was almost the "footprint"
a whale leaves when it sounds
for the depths, but that wasn't

what came up blowing water
like a kid after a dive,
its brown-golden head too big
for a weasel's, and rose up
to its shoulders seeing me there,
its tail working behind--

a river otter, a five-footer,
no goofy stuffed toy, but almost
smiling, the way a salamander
turned up under a log seems to smile
as if to say, You have found me out.

>From "Splash" published in Ocean Effects by Brendan Galvin.
Copyright © 2007 by Brendan Galvin. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

"Galvin is an essential presence in contemporary American poetry."--Tar River Poetry

80 pages, 5.5 x 9

This publication is supported in part by a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Galvin (Habitat) may be known as a nature poet, but the real strength in this very readable volume lies in the people who speak through it, in the dramatic monologues, epistolary impersonations and modern folktales Galvin spins through the longer poems in the middle third of the book. Galvin is also a poet of the Atlantic-of Cape Cod, where he lives, of the seagoing Irish heritage, and of the harsh salt water and air. Most of the verse here reflects lives lived by the sea. "These Little Town Blues" tells entertaining stories in the voices of Massachusetts police who complain about the tourists, whom they call "New Age lizards, washashores, blow-ins." The long, ambitious, informative and ultimately moving "Around Master Williams" pursues American hopes and disappointments in the person and through the pen of Rhode Island's 17th-century founder: "I speak of this Rhode Island drowning/ in disorders of our own creation," Galvin's version of Roger Williams complains. Lyric poems set in Labrador, the Faroe Islands and the wild spaces of contemporary America seem less original, but they too have their moments of obvious beauty: "wild asparagus tall as a man one day,/ barely there the day before."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Brendan Galvin is the author of fourteen poetry books, including six published by LSU Press, the most recent of which, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received many other honors, including the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He lives in Truro, Massachusetts. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 79 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (September 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807132675
• ISBN-13: 978-0807132678
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,166,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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