Brendan Galvin's Sense of Otherness

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves.

—Robinson Jeffers, "Carmel Point"

Reading chronologically more than a dozen volumes of Brendan Galvin's poetry—three of them book-length narratives with compelling characters—one notices growth, change, and a deepening vision with a continuity of voice and a reiteration of these themes: the importance of place, our imperiled ecosystem, mystery, the ecstatic moment, and the near-biblical importance of watching and listening—especially the importance of looking beyond the self. In his essay "The Contemporary Poet and the Natural World" (Georgia Review, spring 1993), Galvin writes: "The attractiveness of egocentric cerebrations is that they require no internship, no time-consuming outside reading, no looking closely at any objects, and no research; you can tap into your inner life right away and get with the program. To write about the natural world with any success, however, you actually have to know something about it because what you say can be verified by an attentive reader."

Galvin's impatience with egocentricity coupled with his interest in bio- and ecocentric awareness tempt me to group him with such writers as Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Maxine Kumin, John Haines, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Henry Beston, John Hay, and others—a disservice to all, for he has always gone his own way, had his own subjects, voice, and world. He has remained wonderfully immune to academic theory and the latest poetic fashions. He has never attended the Blood-Bone-Stone School of Verse or the Minnesota Academy of Leaping Poetry and the Deep Image. He has done no surreal rollerblading through Chilean fright-wig factories, nor has he aired in iambs any rancid family secrets. In Galvin's work one finds no existential voids or windy personal angst, no epigraphs from Czeslaw Milosz or Simone Weil, no poems about Vietnam or Iraq, Van Gogh or Edward Hopper, Osip Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova.

Nor does he subscribe to Gallic notions about the Teflon nature of language, a gamer who believes that the "text" is autonomous—a kind of ping-pong between the words themselves. What he does believe is that poetry takes its strength from a real world beyond words, and that words point toward things and creatures, evoke feelings, and make us see. His work is grounded in close observation and description, in the reciprocal echoes between the natural and human, self-assertion never taking priority over the natural world. Galvin's work is impressively detailed and reveals his training in biology as well as the ready eye of a National Geographic photographer.

The words poetry and poem rarely if ever appear in Galvin's lines, but in his first book, No Time for Good Reasons (1974), a poetic credo appears. In "Stranger," he addresses readers:

                          Though all nightmy wife may stick by my sidewhile I murder friends in a sweatfor their small change, you will notlearn it from me, or our pet names for each otheror our mutual needs; nor any moralor new proof of divinity.

In other words there are no confessions in the manner of Lowell and Sexton, no Emerson or Thoreau revisited. As his career develops, however, "proof of divinity"—the speaker's avowals notwithstanding—will be more of a concern, the nature of the sacred a major theme. But the self, he tells us strangers, will not be a subject, at least not directly. Galvin's aversion to the poetry of self-revelation has remained remarkably consistent. In his fourth book, Winter Oysters (1983), the speaker of one poem openly describes the trap: "I know this wallowing in the soup of self, / that alphabet spelling me, me, / my insides flapping like a love-struck leaf / all sense loping off on the heels / of every urge" ("Dog Love"). Though the poem is primarily about a dog in heat and a squeamishness that the sight of canine copulation causes in the speaker, Galvin also shows how the human tendency to project a culturally formed self upon the world keeps one from seeing clearly. Being awake and seeing clearly in the natural world is of [End...