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| Photo credit: Ellen
Galvin |
Brendan
Galvin
Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965–2005
Louisiana
State University Press
Habitat offers an opportunity to trace a remarkable
poetic career. In their richly various shapes,
colors, textures, and strategies, Galvin’s
poems bear witness to matters both joyful and
intractable.
Brendan Galvin
is the author of thirteen previous poetry books,
including Place Keepers (2003) and
The Strength of a Named Thing (1999).
His work has also appeared in over 400 journals,
textbooks, and anthologies, including The
New Yorker, Poetry, New Republic and
Atlantic Monthly. Among his many honors
are the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O.
B. Hardison, Jr., Poetry Prize, the Sotheby
Prize of the Arvon Foundation, and the International
Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation.
Judges' Citation
Over the past four
decades, in an era deeply suspicious of the
relationship between language and external reality,
Brendan Galvin has been quietly reminding us
that the best poetry can deepen our understanding
of the natural world and of each other. “You
are tired of living when you’re tired
of us,” he imagines a field of potatoes
saying in one poem. And, indeed, if the earthy
and local poems of this volume could speak in
one voice, they would be making the same claim
to past and future readers.
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