That he grows towards an unavoidable despair, in the face of a dying region and a nearly redundant way of life, offers the reader little optimism but abundant realism.įor steady readers of Galvin, it’s a pleasure to see one of his most important characters, the long dead Lyle Van Waning, appear in the poem “Bet.” His character, along with Pat, enters the new book, emphatically, as nearly invisible, small points in the shadow of the mountains that the speaker must point out because “you wouldn’t see them if I didn’t.” The poem begins with the classic description of the Galvinesque landscape, both surreal and sublime, a description taking nearly half the poem’s length, before arriving at a far point where “two men, motionless, study / The last snowdrift.” The drift, set in a meadow, is an object of diminishment that “looks / Like a homeless man, lying, half-fetal with / A dirty sheet thrown over him” but that a month ago “looked more / Like a barn, and was bigger than one.”

That the speakers of these poems are growing-and again, despite any argument to the contrary, much of the joy in Galvin’s poems is that they are from a real person in a real world, the artifice rarely apparent-is undeniable. Galvin’s style, over the course of eight books, has remained remarkably consistent. His newest book, Everything We Always Knew Was True, directly confronts this idea, given the poet’s own aging. In fact, the speakers of the poems become so intertwined with the land, both literally and figuratively, that his body of work becomes a long lament for the individual’s death.

The trajectory of his poetic career, beginning with 1980’s Imaginary Timber, has documented-at least to some extent-the undermining of the land, but more frequently the deterioration of the people who made lives in that country and were, for better or for worse, intimately affixed to it. Perhaps more than any other living American poet, James Galvin understands the decline of the American West. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016.

The meadow by james galvin