Ocean Effects: Poems - Softcover

Galvin, Brendan

2.71

7 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807132675 ISBN 13: 9780807132678

Publisher: LSU Press, 2007

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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.

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About the Author:

Brendan Galvin is the author of Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965– 2005, Sky and Island Light, Saints in Their Ox-Hide Boat, and other books. Among his many honors are the Aiken Taylor Award, given by the Sewanee Review, a Guggenheim fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize.

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."
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