Ocean Effects Poems Author:Brendan Galvin Sharply observed and metaphorically inventive, Ocean Effects is a worthy follow-up to Galvin's National Book Award finalist Habitat. It includes a new vein of Galvin's trademark richly observed lyric poems on the biota, landscapes, and weathers of coastal New England. Seascapes and the natural world bracket sequences spoken... more » by personae as various as the seventeenth-century American colonist Roger Williams, small-town cops, a squatter in the ruins of Chernobyl, a nineteenth-century Russian general in Mongolia, and a Cape Cod carpenter. Galvin's monologues, tensile and energetic free verse, are touched with the speech of the historical periods in which they take place.the surface was too hugely roiled
for a muskrat's dive or a shag's,
it was almost the "footprint"
a whale leaves when it sounds
for the depths, but that wasn'twhat came up blowing water
like a kid after a dive,
its brown-golden head too big
for a weasel's, and rose up
to its shoulders seeing me there,
its tail working behind--a river otter, a five-footer,
no goofy stuffed toy, but almost
smiling, the way a salamander
turned up under a log seems to smile
as if to say, You have found me out.>From "Splash" published in Ocean Effects by Brendan Galvin.