Sounding the Atlantic

Martin Galvin's work reminds us that poems say things the way most people would say them if only they could. In conversation with the reader, many of these poems have a voice that rings with a slight Irish lilt, echoing his boyhood neighborhood in Philadelphia. But rising out of that, the voice is almost always quirky and folksy, angular and hooked, and yet somehow surprising and tender and lyrical. -Rod Jellema