Galvin also writes of App's son Ray, who, while logging at age 12 with his brothers and father, saw a man fishing and was struck dumb by astonishment-it was the first time Ray had ever seen someone he didn't know. App was buried on a ridge where his sons had to use drills and dynamite to dig his grave. Cutting back and forth in time, the author tells of Appleton (``App'') Worster, who homesteaded the meadow in 1895, raising three boys but losing two wives and finally the farm itself in 1938. Galvin's annals are comprised of one hundred very brief vignettes, remarkable for their sympathetic portrayals of these men and women and their Antaeus-like symbiosis with the beautiful but unforgiving land. Here, he tells of the lives of his neighbors and of the successive owners of a ranch consisting in the main of a 360-acre hay meadow. of Iowa) was raised and still lives for part of each year in Tie Siding, Wyoming. They have achieved a right relationship to their environment.A passionate hundred-year history of a small mountain ranch on the Colorado-Wyoming border. The people in the poem are almost too small to see. In “Bet,” the protagonist is landscape and sky. In the poems I’m writing now I’m trying to come home. It made me, to some degree, a satirist-not at all my comfort zone. I couldn’t continue to dwell entirely in a world whose reality is a matter of landscape and weather, where the people play the audience. Even a hurricane was eclipsed by the inadequacy of the response to it. During the Bush years we all came to think that way.

People who live in cities tend to think of reality as a matter of human actions and their consequences. We were helpless victims in a melodrama of lies. Two wars, economic collapse, an oil spill, all the result of lies. I was trying to figure out a way to live and love and value in a culture based on lies and deceit. I was in love, and I was living in George Bush’s America. In my last book, As Is, I was overwhelmed by circumstance. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Galvin is the author of seven collections of poems (most recently As Is, from Copper Canyon Press), and two prose works. This week we offer a new poem by James Galvin.

The meadow galvin