Ocean Effects: Poems

Sharply observed and metaphorically inventive, Ocean Effects is a worthy follow-up to Galvin’s National Book Award finalist Habitat. It includes a new vein of Galvin’s trademark richly observed lyric poems on the biota, landscapes, and weathers of coastal New England. Seascapes and the natural world bracket sequences spoken by personae as various as the seventeenth-century American colonist Roger Williams, small-town cops, a squatter in the ruins of Chernobyl, a nineteenth- century Russian general in Mongolia, and a Cape Cod carpenter. Galvin’s monologues, tensile and energetic free verse, are touched with the speech of the historical periods in which they take place.

Prior to his death in 2023, Brendan Galvin published nineteen books of poetry, including Habitat: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award. Among his many additional honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.