| 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.
From "Skylights"
Every October, after a day when something
exotic has landed at the feeder
and waits gasping there as on a prow
far out at sea, a myrtle or Canada warbler
just too wing-beaten to go on,
I wake late to a good dinner
building its cloud above my heart,
and look up where stars in the skylight
on that night alone have a connect-the-dots logic,
a plan I might follow that's pressing
like a template in my head. Then I envision
the great streaming freeways of the birds,
those swerves and swoopings in every
color of feather, three miles up, blurred
Crayola streaks a hemisphere long . . .
Brendan Galvin is the author of fifteen
poetry collections, including Ocean Effects and Habitat:
New and Selected Poems, 1965–2005, a National Book
Award finalist. The recipient of the Aiken Taylor Award in
Modern American Poetry and the O. B. Hardison Poetry Prize,
he lives in Truro, Massachusetts. |
