X"""" is the kiss and betrayal, the embrace, the crucifixion, the mathematical unknown. In his sixth book of poems, James Galvin writes from a deep, philosophical engagement with the landscape and faces a """"vertigo of solitude"""" with his marriage dissolved, his only daughter grown and gone, and the log house he built by hand abandoned. """"What did I love that made me believe it would last?"""" he asks. Something has to be true enough to beTaken for granted. In the hospital I sawAn old manCaressing the face of an old woman. This same man, young, caressed her faceIn just that way. That's the stillnessAt the center of change-A sadness worth dying for, I swear-There is no other.-from """"Dying into What I've Done""""""""James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry.""""-The Nation""""In James Galvin we have a superior poet.""""-American Book Review""""Galvin's poems have the virtues of precise observation and original language, yes, but what he also brings to the table is a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make the slightest of his poems an architectural pleasure.""""-Harvard ReviewJames Galvin has published five collections of poetry, most recentlyResurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall/The NationPrize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadowand a novel, Fencing the Sky. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he works as a rancher part of each year, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. """" | X by James Galvin, Paperback | Indigo Chapters