Poems - Bio

Trespassers

Now, on this new page,

A new optimism groans into place.

The leaves, like extras

One is beginning to know by name,

Sigh and lift perceptibly.

A doe steps into the clearing and looks towards the house –

Just checking – then turns and highsteps

With exaggerated precision, flight held in,

Back to cover.

Two hunters,

Trespassing but willing to claim

They are lost, mistaken, sorry,

Simmer in the throaty idle of their pickup,

Gazing down a deep draw.

They pull away slowly.  They’ll be back.

The day itself is good.

Whatever happens in the day,

The day itself is good.

A breeze tensely riffles the pond,

Erasing the ponds attempt at representation

Of treetops and sky – try again.

It keeps doing that.

A jet goes over and you rise to build a fire.

As if the jet were a signal.

One hunter says good day, though,

Even if we don’t get anything.

Nice weather.

And the deer steps out of the woods

As if drawn by a magnet.

-from Resurrection Update 

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Poems - Bio

James Galvin was born in Chicago in 1951 and raised in northern Colorado . He earned a B.A. from Antioch College College in 1974 and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1977. He has published several collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997 (Copper Canyon, 1997), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Lethal Frequencies (1995); Elements (1988); God's Mistress (1984), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Marvin Bell; and Imaginary Timber (1980). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadow (1992) and a novel, Fencing the Sky Henry Holt, 1999). His honors include a "Discovery"/The Nation award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. James Galvin lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he has worked as a rancher part of each year all his life, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

Poems - Bio