Imaginary Timber: Poems

by James Galvin

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A word about the relation of aphorism to description. At its most transparent/mundane, the relationship might be axiomatic. Take, pretty much at random, e.g., "Stringers on a Bridge." "Wild mountain roses bloom in the ditches, the smell of sagebrush recurs." This is in prose; the first sentence clause is a line of pentameter, the second a trimeter. It's not quite an epigrammatic couplet. One feature that makes it less than epigram is that it appropriates no genre (parody, satire) in order to get said. Nor is it proverbially wise even at proverb's mediocre norm. At first glance, it's descriptive; at second, the two parts of the sentence are in conversation. The comma suggests a subordination: the sagebrush smell to the ditches' rose blossoms. Indeed, it's this perceptible "barely" quality the poem tropes: "A single peak hovers to the north, barely visible. You have to believe in it to see it, and it is there: enough distance to make that difference." Distance, now, seems to be how we should approach the rose blossom-sagebrush discrepancy, as well. This trope limns what description brings out of the landscape, so that James Galvin's poem is a little essay on characterization. Indeed the prose, over four paragraphs, becomes an excavation of the first time a mentor (in other poems, Lyle Van Waning) took the narrator logging. That question of believability haunts the scene of it, however. Later in the volume, in "Rainshadow," the aphorism expands toward epigram:

If only we could agree that the worst isn't bad,
That only the means remain of the end,
Then the ghost we give up, the believable,

Would long have outlived its usefulness.

A proverb would be something like "The ends justify the means." Epigrams like to ride proverbially for some generic purpose or other, here parodically, though the first line, with its evaluative degree [bad to worst] sounds more axiomatic, like a poorly translated "saying." The believable emerges in description, here likened to a ghost haunting our characterizations of it. The performance of saying rents the (one's tempted to say) homosocial. It's men-not-talking that's enlivened by hyperbole and understatement, where believability becomes erotic.

I'm saying nothing here that isn't better reflected on in the volume's next poem, "Hermits." Much of this works through aphorism, epigram, proverb and non-sequitur. The poem begins, "The more I see of people, the more I like my dog." As if to say, "Hermit-lore is nothing special, but at least it seeks to amuse." Galvin lets his hermit speak here: "And this would be good country if a man could eat scenery." Then the narration emerges, tuning description to aphorism: "The lake's ice gives light back to the air, | Shadows back to water." Now difference "reflects" (that's the lexical association we're in) on the speaker's seeing how he differs from a hermit. Galvin plays riffs off this and handful or two of stanzas. He concludes this way:

Tanglefoot,
Dead-on-your-feet,
A chance to be alone for a chance to be abandoned,
Everything is lost or given.

Hermits never know they're dead till the roof falls in.

The poem itself is a "tanglefoot" of verbal briars. The epithet for the hermit reflects our gracelessness toward them. The third line is an aphorism, superb in its calibration of the narrator's sense for this class of neighbors. The stanza closes on a maxim, much better than mediocre, however the line on which the poem closes is better still. Hard to fathom that a 30-year old published these poems.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Airbrush" / "For Remembering How to Live Without You" / "Getting a Word In"

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

really liked the prose poems in section II.