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

For nearly five decades, award-winning poet Brendan Galvin has written about the birds of the tidal flats, woods, and marshes around his Cape Cod home and on islands in the North Atlantic. He knows their field marks, habits, and songs, and his work demonstrates an obvious fascination with them. Whirl Is King gathers forty-three of his bird poems about herons, owls, shorebirds, warblers, raptors, wrens, and other exotic visitors blown in by wind and storm.Seen from various angles and stratagems, Galvin's migrants and locals are always in motion, acting and acted upon, sometimes predatory, sometimes possessing mythic qualities. In tones ranging from the elegiac to the hilarious, these poems inhabit the overlapping borders of human and avian life: not to salute such / charity of song / though it be plain as / thumbsqueaks on clear windowpanes, / not to say their names, / and the shadow of death passes / across our tongues. Whirl Is King features Galvin's hallmark descriptive powers and verbal music on full display and demonstrates his talent as a contemporary poet.

An endangered right whale attempting to nurse her new calf in the December ocean, foxgloves blooming in different places from year to year, or the rescue of imperiled Kemp's ridley sea turtles--the bounty and cruelty of nature infuses this latest collection of poems from Brendan Galvin, which takes as its maxim finding the extraordinary in the ordinary all around us.

The poems chronicle the waxing and waning of the seasons from one winter to the next in the area around Egg Island, the dunes near a small seacoast town on the outermost reaches of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Galvin's training as a naturalist and environmental writer is evident as his practiced eye roves the waves, marshes, and forests, finding meaning and beauty in the smallest detail-- bird-watching, rebuilding a woodpile, or the flight of bobwhite quail. Other poems recall the poet's affectionate memories of his deceased wife and the life they shared together, acknowledging grief without veering into the maudlin. Always present beneath the surface is the question of where humans fit into this wild, ever-changing landscape.

In meditations that recall the poetry and prose of Mary Oliver or W. S. Merwin, Galvin sets off on a vivid journey sure to increase readers' appreciation for the natural world. Perhaps his most compelling message is that readers need not jet off to Everest or Kilimanjaro to experience mystery and beauty on Earth--there's wonder aplenty in our own backyards.

The Air's Accomplices vividly evokes poet Brendan Galvin's love for the rugged landscapes of Cape Cod and Ireland and their elusive inhabitants. Weaving themes of death, migration, and aging into an exploration of the natural world, Galvin's work reflects a deep engagement with the places he and his family have called home, as well as with the triumphs and tragedies of human life.

The collection begins by examining the vagaries of age, as Galvin ponders his role as caretaker for his wife following her stroke. It then moves into remembrances of walks on the beaches of Cape Cod, encounters with land and sea animals, and observations of the Atlantic Ocean's calm and violence. Other poems commemorate Galvin's Irish heritage and the emigration of family and friends from Donegal to the suburbs of his native Massachusetts. Whether eulogizing a deceased pet or capturing the flight of a seabird, The Air's Accomplices reveals a keen sense of observation and empathy for all living things.

Brendan Galvin's book-length poem, Wampanoag Traveler, is told from the point of view of one Loranzo Newcomb, a fictional eighteenth-century natural historian, gardener, lone wanderer, fabulist, and failed lover. A sort of Johnny Appleseed in reverse, Newcomb traverses the American colonies, gathering seeds, botanical specimens, and fauna for the gardens and collections of wealthy patrons in England, and a host of observations for himself.

Wampanoag Traveler makes vivid a lost world in which science and superstition, fact and tall tale are interlocked. The poem is arranged in fourteen sections that deal variously with such subjects as gardening, the mystical delirium that follows a poisonous snakebite, failed love, hummingbirds and skunks, and the young Newcomb's apprenticeship to a birdmaster who bears a close resemblance to Audubon.

The section, Some Entertainments Sent with a Gift Snuffbox Carved from an Alligator's Tooth, which was awarded a Sotheby's Prize by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney through the Arvon International Poetry Competition in 1987, is a poetic tall tale in which Newcomb describes raising a baby alligator to dragon-sized proportions.

My first alligator I dragged out of
a fish hawk's grasp when it was
no longer than my foot,
and trained it up on crabs and herring
until what I hesitate to call gratitude
appeared and strengthened in its nature
at last, and I could with patience
inure it to reins and a light saddle.

Through much of the poem, a somber tone, a pervading sense of sadness, underlies the naturalist's exuberant vision. Newcomb feels an unpurgeable sorrow rise from his sense of isolation his preference for gardening over people (no easy admission). He mourns the fact that the American garden he loves is already being despoiled. In the poem's last section, Envoy, Newcomb projects into the future a history of the apple as a metaphor for American innocence gone sour.

Combining a vibrant early American sensibility with his own contemporary sense of poetics, Galvin creates a life that proceeded in a very different time from our own, fraught with choices we no longer remember. In a remarkable tour de force, he engages a voice from the past in a dialogue with a future that becomes--magically and sadly--our own historical moment.

Partway to Geophany, the latest collection by celebrated poet Brendan Galvin, chronicles the waxing and waning of the year in a small seacoast town on Cape Cod, alongside observations of other beloved places. As a naturalist and environmentalist, Galvin undertakes poems that meditate on wildlife, landscape, and the passage of time. His verse presents powerful and immediate detailings of quotidian experience, with poems about love and loss, local people and customs, foreign and domestic travel, and writing itself. Throughout, Galvin probes the implied question, What is humanity's place in the natural world? His masterful use of the narrative lyric produces poems of great mystery and intimacy, in tones varying from grave to playful, as he reflects on the cruelties of time and the pleasures of being alive.

Sharply observed and metaphorically inventive, Ocean Effects is a worthy follow-up to Galvin's National Book Award finalist Habitat. It includes a new vein of Galvin's trademark richly observed lyric poems on the biota, landscapes, and weathers of coastal New England. Seascapes and the natural world bracket sequences spoken by personae as various as the seventeenth-century American colonist Roger Williams, small-town cops, a squatter in the ruins of Chernobyl, a nineteenth- century Russian general in Mongolia, and a Cape Cod carpenter. Galvin's monologues, tensile and energetic free verse, are touched with the speech of the historical periods in which they take place.

This stunning collection presents locales ranging from Ireland to the Outer Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetland Islands, and the poet's native Cape Cod. In line after line Brendan Galvin evokes the physical world with a naturalist's eye, dazzlingly apparent in the brushstrokes by which he depicts a gull sliding on a crawl of heat among exposed hummocks or white birches standing like hairline / faults of frost / driven through stone.

In all this seething life, in this world of light and shadows, Galvin suggests a web of sensibility. Cemeteries, deserted villages, lost faces--such fragments Galvin transmutes into meditations on the blood-deep mysteries of death, desire, and the phylogeny of consciousness, all conjured with an instinct for the telling nuance of behavior and a delight in the language of everyday conversation.

Lying behind much of Sky and Island Light is the question of what is worthy of our passion; the answer, we learn in A Cold Bell Ringing in the East, comes most easily to the outsider:

What joy in having been at all,
in feeding the fire and knowing
that everything isn't about us.

What joy indeed. Sky and Island Light is a superb collection by a remarkable poet, one who combines uncannily scrupulous habits of observation with astonishing stylistic grace.