Product Description

A master craftsman who seamlessly combines vision and contemplation, Brendan Galvin is considered among the most powerful naturalist poets today. Habitat, Galvin’s fourteenth poetry book, combines eighteen new works with lyric pieces from the past forty years—including two book-length narratives, Wampanoag Traveler and Saints in Their Ox-Hide Boat. In a voice of quiet authority leavened with humor, Galvin intimately conveys his landscapes, birds and animals, people, and weather. By elevating the commonplace to the crucial, he takes his readers very far from the familiar.

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1161391 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

Review
"Few living poets are as memorable in their descriptions of the goings-on in the non-man-manufactured world."

About the Author
Brendan Galvin is the author of fourteen poetry books, most recently Placekeepers and The Strength of a Named Thing. His poems have appeared more than six hundred times in anthologies and magazines, including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, Nation, Paris Review, and Poetry. He has received, among other awards and honors, the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation, the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Truro, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

A Masterly Touch
We are blessed on Cape Cod with a disproportionate number of truly great artists, and Brendan Galvin is as good as it gets, even in such heady company as Robert Pinsky, Alan Dugan, Mary Olver, Mark Doty, Keith Althaus, Stanley Kunitz, Gail Mazur -- on and on it goes. All of them live on the Cape off and on during the year, and Galvin is a year rounder. As a naturalist poet, Galvin's observations always seem newly turned. No matter how many times you read verse about a dune, a coyote, or a gold sweep of marsh grass, Galvin makes it seem different. And his sense of humor is, at times, wildly funny. Perhaps it's something about the water in Truro because the late Alan Dugan had that sense of humor that would just stop you in your tracks. Galvin was a finalist for the National Book Award this year for "Habitat," and it's a wonderful retrospective of his work, along with his newest efforts. If you aren't familiar with Galvin's work, do yourself a favor and spring for the price of this book. It's almost as good as a trip to Cape Cod itself and, when you consider who your guide is, perhaps even better.