Sky and Island Light

the long version

This stunning collection presents locales ranging from Ireland to the Outer Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetland Islands, and the poet's native Cape Cod. In line after line Brendan Galvin evokes the physical world with a naturalist's eye, dazzlingly apparent in his brushstrokes depicting a gull sliding "on a crawl of heat among exposed hummocks" or white birches standing "like hairline / faults of frost / driven through stone." In all this seething life, in this world of light and shadows, Galvin suggests a web of sensibility. Cemeteries, deserted villages, lost faces - such fragments Galvin transmutes into meditations on the blood-deep mysteries of death, desire, and the evolution of consciousness, all conjured with an instinct for the telling nuance of behavior and a delight in the language of everyday conversation.