Everything We Always Knew Was True

by James Galvin

"James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."— The Nation "Bleak and unsentimental but blessedly free of self-indulgence, these poems give the feeling of being absolutely essential."— Library Journal "Galvin [has] the virtues of precise observation and original language . . . a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make [each] poem an architectural pleasure."— Harvard Review In his first collection in seven years, James Galvin expands upon his signature spare and gnomic lyric as he engages restrained astonishment, desire, and loss in a confessional voice. Whether considering masterpieces of painting or describing the austere landscape of his native Wyoming ranchlands, Galvin turns to highly imagistic yet intimate narratives to rain down compassion within isolation. From "On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses": On starless, windless nights like this
I imagine
I can hear the wedding dresses
Weeping in their closets,
Luminescent with hopeless longing,
Like hollow angels.
They know they will never be worn again.
Who wants them now,
After their one heroic day in the limelight?
Yet they glow with desire
In the darkness of closets. James Galvin passionately depicts the rural American West and the interactions between humans and nature in his best-selling memoir The Meadow and his novel Fencing the Sky . Galvin is also the author of several volumes of poetry and teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He divides his time between Iowa and Wyoming.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published August 9, 2016

Reviews

[McKenna R · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were some really good poems in here, but some of them were just so-so to me. I liked all the "What It's Like" poems and "On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses." Overall I like James Galvin.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Writers Workshop poet-teacher of longest standing, James Galvin's seventh or eighth volume (the collected poems, Resurrection Update included new poems) returns to form from the strained As Is (2008), but there's something cooly appraising here, and if I hear it fairly, something pleading for a rationale in the self-cultivating mythos of passing into retirement alone. The first half of the book sprinkles its anti-marriage prayers among its curses, the curse a mode Galvin finds quite companionable (I much enjoyed "Bringing Down the House," the rare cultural poem in Galvin's oeuvre). In the sequences, "Wildlife Management" and "What It's Like," the poet tunes vocally into Blake more than did the "Master" poems from the prior volume. But the volume's last half is given over to love poems, where the anti-marriage policies edge over into a self-reproach the cool stance can ill-afford. Pleasure, richness, craft-care, nonce forms, cool self-appraisal, copper-plated feeling. There was one more thing I wanted.

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pensive ruminations, personal reflections and philosophical renditions inform these landscapes and portraits. Some great list poems (like "On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses"). Lots of nature, "Wildlife Management" where the antelope play. And horses. Bites into the American psyche of independence and the frontier. At times the loner stance seems precious. I mean who wouldn't want to own a horse ranch? But then, no one else is covering this beat as well as James Galvin. New from Copper Canyon.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely.

[Danielle Moretti-Langholtz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big fan of the work of James Galvin. This book of poetry did not grab me the way his previous writings have done...even though I so much wished for this reaction.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

What It's Like

A freight elevator in free fall.
A grand piano in it.

*The thread of these poems drives this collection, one that grazes over an American landscape that feels, sometimes, in free fall. Galvin knows how to stop a moment.