Brendan Galvin
Brendan Galvin is the author of sixteen volumes of poems. His collection Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 (LSU, 2006) was a finalist for the National Book Award. His crime novel, Wash-a-shores, is available on Amazon Kindle. The Air's Accomplices, a collection of new poems was released from LSU last year. His Egg Island Almanac will appear in 2017.
Reading List
HARD LINES: Rough South Poetry
Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright, editors. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016. Editor William Wright introduces this collection of “rough southern poetry,” two hundred poems by sixty contemporary poets, in this way: As …
Sure Things
On the day after All Souls I go to pay my taxes. The crow is waiting on the town hall lawn, full of flap, shine, and sass, immune to grievances, withdrawing a line of sustenance from the soil. I have …
A Taut String Across the Path
between the marsh grass and the dunes, so I pulled it, though naturally even out here you tend to wonder about explosions these days. Out on the marsh as I tugged a black-and-white skull-and-crossbones stood up–a kite with red …
Why I Live in the Forest
As though I had walked into some avian display, it hung on in profile to the outside of the livingroom screen, hooked in and as still as its effigy, hoping perhaps to escape notice, if warblers can hope. Already betrayed …
Walter Anderson Sleeping on the Levee
In New Orleans to research Hurricane Betsy, the one he’d ridden out tied to a tree trunk on Horn Island, he rolled up for the night on the levee by Audubon Park, letting the Mississippi talk him to sleep. Surrounded …
An Inch of Electric Green
for Ellen It leapt through a dashboard louver onto the passenger seat. Grasshopper, delicate as a dress accessory you might wear. Did I own a neon windbreaker that color sixty years ago, could I have been that gauche? And if …
Between Two Pine Trunks
What it wasn’t was one of those miniature electrical storms that can appear in a corner of the eye. This one was in blues, greens, purples, colors exotic as the jewelry hawked on TV channels and perhaps with names like …
Ordnance
ORDNANCE Ever see one of these before? McDaid tossed me a hard plug, weightier than the ignorance I’d attached like a water balloon to the phrase “rubber bullet.” It’s January now, but winter and summer I keep coming across these …
Neighbor Fox
Slick calling card on the walkway, not ropy with fur like coyote scat, but as if to say Don’t tread on me. Not halfway through February I’d seen the fox three times, first stalking a great blue heron that waded …
Alien
Until he turned his yellow glare on me, the snowy owl was a two-foot clump of snow in the wind-chopped flow of sand and grasses beaten gold behind the dunes, then a white lump down off the taiga from Keewatin …
Walking Will Solve It
Or so the Romans prescribed. A half-mile down the Egg Island flats the fridge can’t mumble its imprecations at me, the bills, taxes and toxins seem to be sloughing off, all the home stuff that makes me feel I’m a …
Names by a River [with audio]
Names by a River The keels of the Speedwell and Discoverer four hundred years ago passed over where I am walking among the glasswort and Hudsonia this morning, the river’s estuary here then. Before Bradford and Miles Standish you came …
Sentry
Thistle, you look like another of evolution’s jokes, impossible as a great blue heron seems impossible, though you both are brilliant survivors. Still, mixed metaphor, it looks like someone hung you all over with shaving brushes nobody soft-handed could wield, …
Striped Maple History
The stump looked like a medical illustration of a heart, and its few wispy sprouts showed me it wanted to live, so I planted it by the door thirty years ago. Each fall before the winds I still cut one …