Lethal Frequencies

Poetry. This fourth collection from the author of the prose masterpiece The Meadow is inspired by the often harsh subrural landscape of southwestern Wyoming where Galvin has spent most of the past decade building a log home, beginning with the felling of trees. Firsthand knowledge of the expansive landscape of the west provides perspective more than mere imagery, reducing human activity to its proper dimension. Galvin adds a kind of pre-Socratic intelligence, a stoical turn of mind, and genuine love of hard physical work to make poems that are direct, spare, compact, and stripped of rhetorical or aesthetic device.

This fourth collection from the author of the prose masterpiece The Meadow is inspired by the often harsh subrural landscape of southwestern Wyoming where Galvin has spent most of the past decade building a log home, beginning with the felling of trees. Firsthand knowledge of the expansive landscape of the west provides perspective more than mere imagery, reducing human activity to its proper dimension. Galvin adds a kind of pre-Socratic intelligence, a stoical turn of mind, and genuine love of hard physical work to make poems that are direct, spare, compact, and stripped of rhetorical or aesthetic device.

Publishers Weekly

Prominent chronicler of the West, Galvin (Elements) again employs a spare style to depict the tough landscapes of his Wyoming home and his unsentimental affection for the people who live there. No ``cowboy poet,'' Galvin refuses to romanticize the West: ``The wind, when it finds me, bears no trace/ Of sage-sweet horse smell, no color black,/ No softness of muzzle of the/ Mare, her mane curving and lifting,/ Where she graces the horizon down to nothing.'' The consistent, tough-minded sensibility (which also marked his 1992 novel, The Meadow) of these poems is lit by flashes of humor (``Statistics show that/ One in every five/ Women/ Is essential to my survival''). The real surprise of this volume is ``The Sacral Dreams of Ramon Fernandez,'' an imaginative speculation about the life of a real-life European critic mentioned in Wallace Stevens's ``The Idea of Order at Key West.'' Stripped of the familiar wilderness locales, Galvin's ability to summon up another's inner world takes center stage. (Mar.)

James Galvin is both a rancher in Wyoming and on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of six books of poems, an acclaimed memoir The Meadow, and a novel.