Martin Galvin’s Comments

I hesitate to pre-tell any reader how I meant a poem. Surely there are elements of my own experience in these poems: the abiding fascination with language, even clichés; the memory of a summer afternoon when I actually did cleat a friend in a sandlot game—but not on purpose; an old Brownie photograph of my parents in our back yard. But each of the facts that started the poems has had the happy transmuting of time and image to make them more than they were and a merciful love of poetry I have had for my entire conscious life to gentle them into being. I thank the reader for finding some shared human and aesthetic values in my adjustings of reality.

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