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Elements by James Galvin (review)

James Galvin’s third volume of verse, Elements, redefines and extends the themes of his previous two books, Imaginary Timber (1980) and God’s Mis­ tress (1984). While celebrating the cycles and rhythms of an incredibly lovely western landscape, Galvin presents us a poetry of frightening uncertainties. These are poems of loss, emptiness, of righting oneself against a fundamental world. Subtle links between poems unify the entire volume: wind, death of loved ones, borders, abandoned dwellings. He experiments with verse forms and line lengths, using a seven beat line for his narrative poems and tighter lines for the lyrics. Galvin’s technical virtuosity allows him to express his meditations eloquently. One of the most complex poems is “Cartography,” which deals with the borders between what we know and what we don’t/can’t comprehend. The poem suggests that man himself will disappear if unable to define himself through his own self-constructed systems. “Cartography” explores the bound­ aries we erect as hedges (“snowfences” ) against reality. The book also contains moving love poems to loved ones and to life. “What We Said the Light Said” concerns both a love affair and the varying effects of light itself, a contemplative study in the lyrical mode. In “Justice” and “Spring Blizzard” (“A limb’s sententious crack” ) we find a hint of Emerson’s Oversoul, transformed as a starkly contemporary personification of nature. My own favorites include “At the Sand Creek Bridge,” (“The lapidary green / Of the little snake / Who swims like water in water” ) and “Testi­ mony,” which testifies to the impermeability of things themselves: “You can’t step into the same / River even once.” Galvin makes both the ephemeral and the eternal of abiding interest to the reader. One wonders what to expect next from a writer who writes this well in only his third volume.