“Brendan Galvin is one of our best poets of place, perhaps the best. Egg Island Almanac takes us again to his home turf, to the woods and marshes at the outer reaches of Cape Cod, and in line after line he renders the physical world of changing seasons with a fine eye: a fox ‘light-footing it over the dunes of snow,’ chickadees braving a blizzard ‘in their workaday coveralls,’ or a peacock ‘spreading his fan like a stained-glass window.’ Written in the poet’s eighth decade, these poems are aware of the cruelty of time and the past that keeps happening, especially in the wake of his wife’s death, but small treasures of observation hold each day together and make endurance worth the effort.”—Peter Makuck, author of Long Lens: New and Selected Poems, Pulitzer Prize nominee
“‘Lavishly bushwhacked’ by Cape Cod and the creatures who share it with him, Brendan Galvin remains our most provocative witness to the thresholds where the wild and the settled intersect. Versed in Frost’s ‘old ways of being new,’ he employs his keen eye, salty wit, vast knowledge of living things, and gift for metaphor to reveal in Egg Island Almanac a landscape and a heartscape that readers will never forget.”—R. T. Smith, author of In the Night Orchard: New and Selected Poems
“At once elegiac and satiric, the poems in Brendan Galvin’s Egg Island Almanac reveal a writer at home in the largest sense. Galvin has always been a careful observer of the natural world, and his attention and intelligence resonate in this bird-haunted collection. The ridicule of American pretensions and acquisitiveness is always gentle but pointed, and the land itself always, inevitably, wins. An autumn melancholy dominates the tone, even of the spring poems, but it’s a sadness shot through with the quiet wisdom of a man dedicated to recording and interpreting even the smallest of beings. As he says in ‘Getting a Grip,’ something as tiny as a single chickadee has something of value to show us: ‘taking its time, . . . / for just the right seed, passing / its grip down to me, / a strength, a way of holding on.’”—Sarah Kennedy, author of The Gold Thread
“Egg Island Almanac” by Brendan Galvin, Southern Illinois University Press, 2017, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-8093-3607-4
"Brendan Galvin is the author of 17 poetry collections, has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has won the Guggenheim Fellowship and many more prestigious awards. His 18th poetry collection, titled, “Egg Island Almanac,” is filled with stories of Cape Cod’s beaches and wildlife. His poems transport you to the environment he is focusing on, and his words reveal a vast knowledge of the outside world. “Egg Island Almanac” is the perfect collection of poems to read on a cold autumn afternoon to unwind from your day."--Cape Cod Times
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