~RUSS KESLER~
RHYTHMS
OF EXPERIENCE: BRENDAN GALVIN'S OCEAN
EFFECTS
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 . . .
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, as
is evident in the collection’s title poem (shortened to “Ocean
Effect”), in which the speaker sees “that blur on clarity setting out
across the water / a few miles off, then here,” then imagines the
various forms of ice that “four below zero” will produce: “frazil ice,”
a suspension of frozen spicules that is “textured like grease.”
Later, “the bay ice will build to shuga / …then to nilas / and pancake
ice, floes . . ..” Galvin revels in such naming, as the title of
an earlier collection, The Strength
of a Named Thing, makes explicit, and his poems resonate with
the music that passion affords, whether it be literal, as with the ice,
or metaphorical, the “soft stars, cog-wheels and compass roses” of snow
(“Hard Evidence”), or the plant life in “Stations,” the apple trees
that “look assembled out of worn-out hipbones / and warbler loopholes
not long for this world,” “foxgrape that lives as long as that
mossbacked / snapping turtle that floats like its own islet in the
river.”
Galvin’s facility with metaphor has not deserted him
through the four decades in which he’s been publishing, nor has his
gift of making those metaphors reflect his affection for the plant and
animal life at the center of his work. In “As in a Succession of
Russian Dolls” the speaker finds the “hollow pelt” a molting bat has
left behind, “A furry lump like the back of a brown creeper / on the
side of the deck’s newel post, then / the earlets, and one stick-leg
flung out / as if in afterthought…origami gone all wrong.…” The
bat in flight is “a pre-bird, post-butterfly dither / of indecision
coming my way, the jittery / misdirections of bat flight, / like the
heartbeat of a bad time, // as when the ingénue presses / the
back of her hand to her lips and casts / a look of horror out into the
audience.” “Splash” recounts the speaker’s encounter with a
river otter, that “came up blowing water / like a kid after a dive…no
goofy stuffed toy, but almost / smiling, the way a salamander / turned
up under a log seems to smile / as if to say, You have found me out.” Such
tropes sometimes skirt the edge of anthropomorphism, but the poems’ wry
tone and the speaker’s acuity of observation help avoid the maudlin.
It follows that a poetry so rooted in the natural
world will be spoken by a solitary seer. The speakers of Galvin’s
poems that focus on that world are almost always alone, a condition
that grants him the freedom to interact with its inhabitants unfettered
by the possible taint or loss of focus in which interaction with
another human presence might result. But as with the peripatetic
speaker who observes the natural world in so many of Mary Oliver’s
poems, Galvin’s speaker needs that condition if his work of showing the
reader the extraordinary in the ordinary—indeed, of demanding, at
times, that we look along with him—is to be fully accomplished.
Reading these poems, we understand that the speaker is not some
suburban dweller out for a breath of fresh air and perhaps a glimpse of
a heron, but someone for whom life without a steady diet of
accomplished interaction with birds and trees and all manner of
landscapes would not be complete. And the fact that the names of
those inhabitants, a thorough knowledge of their ways, and the unforced
metaphors that make them accessible to readers who are not as familiar
with them are literally part of Galvin’s psyche is a big part of what
makes his poems more than “nature poems.” The speakers of
Galvin’s poems might be physically apart from human contact, but they
show us ways in which all of us, even city dwellers, can deepen our
understanding of the natural world and the importance of acknowledging
our bond with it.
The poems described thus far comprise the first and
last sections of Ocean Effects.
In the middle of the collection are three sections of poems that are
composed of sequences spoken by folk as diverse as the American
colonist Roger Williams and small-town police officers. The
extended sequence of dramatic monologues is ground Galvin has traversed
before in such collections as Hotel
Malabar and Wampanoag Traveler,
and here the most successful sequences are those spoken by Sgt. Crocker
Newton, a beat cop in Cape Cod, and Williams. In the former, the
sergeant recounts, often in jocular and idiomatically-rich diction,
interactions between the “one-to-a-crate originals / already present
and accounted for— / the homegrowns dealing joints and coke / out of
their rides at the beach parking lots,” and the “New Age lizards,
washashores, blow-ins” that are drawn to the Cape as an exotic refuge
“because Florida’s too far, too big a drain / on their
concentration.” Newton Crocker’s sequence shows Galvin to be as
acute an observer of the inhabitants of a village as those of a dune on
the Massachusetts beach.
The sequence spoken by Roger Williams is even more
ambitious. The poems are epistolary, and all save the last are
dated, covering the years from 1636 to 1678. Vividly recounted in
“The Snow Trial” is Williams’ being rescued from a snow storm by “the
hands of Massasoit’s people” and led “back to the smell of mud, / and
skunk cabbage melting its way out of old snow.” In “Letter
from Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Jr.,” he reflects on native
grasses—“Common hairgrass / and panic grass, rice grass—each is like /
a trusted apprentice who goes about his business / without our notice”
—and their relative usefulness for his fellow colonists (“Neither these
nor the native ryes and broomstraws / I mention will compete with
English hays in promoting / the girth and disposition of your beasts,
however” ). And in “A Proposal of Banishment” he bemoans the
ubiquitous packs of wolves that roam the woods of the colony: “those
gluttonous runnagadoes / will fasten upon a single free-ranging hog /
and reduce it to ribs and trotters ere / a farmer may fire a salute in
the direction / of their banquet.” In all of this, Galvin’s
knowledge of the native flora and fauna of New England serves him
well. His long delight in elaborate metaphor and his wry humor
are in evidence in these sequences, but the voices are those of the
personae, consistent and utterly convincing. And it is
interesting to see Galvin turning to a longer line in the dramatic
monologues, while preserving the complex syntactical patterns that are
consistently present in his work. While these poems lack some of
the structural tension and tight focus of the poems in the first and
last sections of the book, they remind us of the breadth of Galvin’s
range, and in fact they perhaps allow him to speak to his old concerns
in ways that are sometimes more subtle and less insistent than in some
of the poems found in the first and last sections of the book.
Galvin is a poet who has published much but not too
much; that is, many of the poems here are as fresh and powerful as the
poems in such strong earlier collections as Atlantic Flyway, Seals in the Inner Harbor, and Winter Oysters. While Galvin
continues to work the same material, he manages to make it new.
Ocean Effects,
Brendan Galvin. LSU Press, 2007. ISBN: 0807132675 $16.95
© by Russ Kesler
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