As Is

James Galvin’s tightly controlled and detailed poems evoke measured optimism and wonder in a spare existential world where certain characters—”The Mastermind” and the “Members of the Board”—are perennial shadows that haunt our times. Here is a windblown landscape where the slow death of a deer caught in barbed wire contrasts with the lifesaving tenderness of a palm extended to a kiss, a naked hip exposed to a caress. Like fables suggesting new truths, the personal narratives and love poems of As Is intertwine to confront the paradoxes of art, politics, and domestic life. “All poems are love poems” leans hard against “[s]ome poems are better off dead”: each assertion rightfully claims its hard-won place. Salvation can turn immediately to devastation: “After the drought / The river took / Back everything.”  Yet there remains an unrelenting capacity for beauty.