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Book: X: Poems
Written by James Galvin (Copper Canyon Press)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz
"What did you expect
Threadbare me to do
With nothing to deflect
The gale of your remove?"With an appeal as strong as that in "Dear Nobody's Business," appearing so early in James Galvin's collection of poems, X ,one almost expects a recurring theme - something tangible to run throughout. That begged-for answer is never really delivered in satisfying terms though. Galvin evokes images continually of those who have tormented and left, but hides them like a verbal illusionist behind dark curtains and forms.
Decorated by many, James Galvin is a permanent faculty member of the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop. He is the author of the prose tract The Meadow and a novel, Fencing the Sky, as well as four previous volumes of poetry. The first new book since 1997, for Galvin X is a study in energetic somberness; a type of three-dimensional meditation on answers, unknown.
There is a crucial juxtaposition throughout X between toned down voices and the scattered poetry that bursts from the page like buckshot. Splendid work like the peculiar "Jet Stream" and "Fire Season" spread across the whole page, the latter questioning and asserting with beautiful imagery: "Maybe her angelic red hair made me think she was / ablaze as it flaunted the prairie and made a festival of itself." Galvin's poems have a rough tendency to cascade - to trickle, a broad stroke approach giving that visual appeal. It isn't as much daring as it is satisfying.
There are the moments where X reverts to a quiet almost bashful tone, as it does in "Rolling Sun" where compact form finds simplicity. A childlike quality, no less profound than its counterpart, drips from the line: "I bear a ghost to the lost / Like an ant carrying a butterfly. / I think the world of ashes. / I think the world of sky."
If Galvin were a painter, and his book X a canvas, it might be said that he possesses the rare ability to know the shape of his hidden subjects.
© 2003 - Erick Mertz