Brendan Galvin: OCEAN EFFECTS

In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Fall/Winter 2008-2009: Volume X, Number 1) Russ Kesler reviews Brendan Galvin’s latest collection of poetry, Ocean Effects.

Brendan Galvin is the author of fourteen previous poetry books, including Place Keepers (2003) and The Strength of a Named Thing (1999). Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005, was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award in 2005 for Galvin. His work also has appeared in hundreds of journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, New Yorker, and Poetry. Among his many honors and awards are the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation, and the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation.

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Ocean Effects, Brendan Galvin. LSU Press, 2007. ISBN: 0807132675 $16.95


In an essay published in the journal Ploughshares in the late 1970s, Brendan Galvin decried a type of poem he called the “Mumbling Poem,” one that “substitutes odd imagery for direct statement, and a maundering tone for real feeling.” The authors of such poems, he said there, fail to “write out of a sense of place, a location, a concrete set of external circumstances which might tempt concentration on something other than their own cerebrations.” Galvin asserted that in these poems, “rarely does the reader feel the rhythms of experience as one does in Lawrence’s animal poems or in Frost’s poems about work, for instance.” Statements such as those, though they might come across as prickly and a bit too self-assured, firmly place Galvin in the ranks of poets to whom an acute understanding of the natural world—the wonders of its workings and of human interaction with it—are of first importance.

Over the course of more than a dozen previous collections, Galvin has written about the land and waters of coastal New England, and Ocean Effects finds him still walking the dunes and forest roads, the beaches and pond edges that hold him in thrall. His passion for specific naming of the biota and animal life he encounters is present always . . ..


[Visitors are invited to read the rest of the review of Brendan Galvin by Russ Kesler in the new Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

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In addition, readers will find poems by Galvin and Kesler in past issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review:

Brendan Galvin in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue of VPR: “A Neolithic Meditation”

Russ Kesler in the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of VPR: “From a Fifties Childhood”

Russ Kesler in the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of VPR: “Self Portrait”