Quiet Mountain Essays

Copyright © 2010

Pulleys & Locomotion
by Rachel Galvin
Black Lawrence Press; $14.00.  Available: Black Lawrence Press; Amazon
reviewed by Charles Luden

I like Pulleys & Locomotion.  Is it good poetry?  It makes me feel good, so yes.  Especially after two
shots of rum, it really zings home.  This book, Ms. Galvin's first full length work, reminds me of the
feel from good poets before.  I can get lost in its method on the page as it transforms my mind into
illusions and dreams.  Galvin's drum has a rhythm that begs me to enter her zone and be
comfortable, yet challenged, for awhile.  

Pulleys & Locomotion jumps to the ethereal, to the real, and to the imagination awaiting another
reality, but is grounded as the foot touches the road.  I walk in Galvin's poems to a place that delivers
an enigma, a jump to wherever the soul knows and needs no definition to clarify the feeling of being.  
I am not using her poems as a guide, but as a reinforcement of where I have been, or would like to go,
in many nights of realization that we all travel roads to here and there. A journey that is elusive but
real.   

Some lines from Pulleys & Locomotion:

Overnight clocks had regained authority, took
metronomes for brides. Young Rivka stashed the last
unofficial green in a basket of apples and ran

to her Moishe, who in three minutes recounted
the original malady of every stone in the village.
Where to find a remedy? We fluttered

our hands in supplication, merchants went on conversing
in the marketplace, adding consonants on one hand,
launching sums on paper wings--
  --From  "After the Eclipse: Village Tale" (p 23)


A woman in a red coat gazed at a photo of herself naked,
her hair tucked into a hat.  If she impersonated herself

long enough, would she become what she saw?
When she retreats, language meets clay, space

smoothes into line. Who are the bearers of compassion,
my friend.  She left, easing the diagrams

of her thoughts as she went.
--From "When All Speech Has Ceased Within" (p 39)

The influences are many, but Galvin's voice has its own mind.  She takes me where Bly, Codrescu,
Knott, Hacker, Creeley, Lazard, Edson, Pommy Vega, Yau, Breton, Desnos, Mansour, among others
have taken me before.  The book is not flat.  It flows.    

Contributor's Notes...

Mr. Luden is the author of the poetry book West of Venus.  His work is featured in the anthology From the Lonely Cold
(2009, Scurfpea Publishing.)

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