In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

When I was five years old, my mother, my brother, and I moved from the urban Seattle area to a small, rural area in Eastern Washington called Goldendale because my mother had relatives there and because the doctors said that my brother needed to move to a drier area if he was going to overcome [...]

Although James Galvin’s often portrays a harsh country that is inhabited by tough characters, I’m also impressed by the gentle characters who manage to survive in the harsh world he portrays: PRACTICE The world arrived so carefully packed in time, in time to open, it could have been God’s parachute. We booby-trapped it. God, you will remember from the Old Testament, was a terrorist. Now He’s [...]

James Galvin’s poems taken from "Elements," published in 1988, seem rather different from earlier poems, less concrete, more philosophical, many lacking the sense of place of the earlier poems. Although I tend to like concrete poems more than abstract poems, there are a number of delightful poems in this section that expand on [...]

I’ve struggled through the final section of James Galvin’s Resurrection Update, the poems published in 1995 and 1996. Some of that is probably due to a cold, but I’ve done some of my best reading while home in bed with a cold. I suspect it has more to do with a shift in [...]