Product Description
An American Library Association Notable Book

In discrete disclosures joined with the intricacy of a spider's web, James Galvin depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border. Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western character. The Meadow evokes a sense of place that can be achieved only by someone who knows it intimately.
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Customer Reviews (39)

Galvan Evokes Life of the Country a City Dweller can Love
Like the reader who stated the book was about his family, I am connected to Jim through his beautiful daughter whose middle name comes from Lyle in the book.I heard him read from the book, just a short passage about dieing and the unspoken bonds and feelings we have.Through the recollection of a memory, you can fall into the world easily, and he makes country living beautiful to a former Midwest native now in L.A.He is a brilliant and straight forward writer, who deserves far more notoriety than he has...not that he would care, or even want it.

"A GEM"
The author tells you in exquisite detail what it is like living in a small isolated ranch in the west through the lives of several persons who occupied a piece of land over the years.The stories are gripping, realistic and (altho fiction) are absolutely true.And it is told by a master; his prose alone is worth the reading -- there is a ton of craft in the writing, but also special gifts.This book is a gem.

for only the pleasure of the unseen creator
Readers should not blame their inability to follow this story on the writing. Most will absorb it with eager thoughtfulness.Writing is a creative gift.This book is beautifully written, and the quiet lost lives of those living around the meadow are beautifully expressed in word pictures.If you're the type who is addicted to Louis LaMour novels (which are wonderful in their own right), then you will not find this book the same at all.It is a different writer, a different creation, a different time.The lives of the people in this story haunt me, as they are the people who no one notices, living within the violent beauty of the Rockies.The mountains and meadows remain - the lives that are lived in their valleys are swallowed up and unnoticed, forgotten.This prose, these words, are the only pictures of lives lived in silent strength and solitude, where only God looked down and apreciated their hearts.A flower blooms in the cleft of a rock wall under an overhang near a creek, God puts it their for no one to see but for his own pleasure.That wildflower is the life of Lyle, or Ray, or Frank.We are so fortunate to be given a glimpse, a glance, a peek, at the pleasures of the Creator.

The Gift of Place
This non-linear piece of prose is elegant in its ability to take us to a place now long-gone.Capturing the life of a meadow on the high plains of the Colorado Wyoming border, Galvin creates a rich and vivid description of life over a 100 year span.
His main character, Lyle, is a true man of the old farming west and a lover of the land as it was.Galvin's ability to create mental pictures of people, land and life makes the book a enthralling read.
Don't expect it to move quickly, although the entire book is done in vignettes. Don't expect to remember all the characters, especially if you lay the book down and don't pick it back up for a few days.Even with these reading challenges, the book is a gift of great writing and a glimpse of the past.

What Can I Say?
This book is a keeper, one that is on my shelf for rereading. James Galvin's stories remind me of the old-timers in my life here in Arizona, their quirks yet because they authentic you can't help but adore them. Unfortunately many of these old-timers are gone now and I therefore can appreciate a book like The Meadow where such stories are preserved in time and preserved with beauty and poetry. Such an unusual and unexpected combination - I love this book and would now like to read Mr. Galvin's poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
From critically acclaimed author of The Meadow comes a haunting novel of the American West.

Circumstances spiral out of control when an accidental murder springs from the best intentions.With one man dead and another on the run, this is a story about violence and how it destroys lives when the land is at stake.This lyrical first novel--long-awaited by the many admirers of James Galvin's The Meadow--is nothing less than the story of the disappearance of the American West.
Amazon.com Review
James Galvin opens his first novel with a shocking, seeminglyinexplicable murder--horseman Mike Arans closes on a pistol-packingmotorist named Merriwether Snipes, throws a rope and snaps hisneck--and then proceeds to illuminate why it happened, what it means,and how Mike deals with the consequences. Though billed as a novel,Fencing the Sky is in fact a more deeply fictionalizedcontinuation of TheMeadow, Galvin's partly historic, partly imagined evocation ofa way of life that took hold on an upland Wyoming ranch for a centuryand then blew away.

If The Meadow is elegiac, Fencing the Sky is angry andblackly humorous. This is the grim, greedy '90s, when swaggeringdevelopers like Merriwether Snipes ride the range in their ATV's,carving up the old homesteads into 40-acre ranchettes and making lifehell for the few decent people who remain. Galvin makes three of theseholdouts his heroes--Oscar Rose, who supports a cattle habit (andfamily) by working as a vet; Adkisson Trent, a doctor who inheritedfrom his father a spectacular spread and a penchant for proudsolitude; and Arans, the renegade, who fled from New Jersey to becomea cowboy. The heat of the book rises from the connections and passionsof these men--their women and work troubles, their unspoken bond witheach other, their fury at Snipes and everything he represents.

Galvin, a poet, has assembled his narrative out of vivid shards, yet,despite the jump-cuts, this is an old-fashioned novel at heart, withheroes and villains, heartbreak and suspense, and characters so realyou want to ride out and shake hands. The same themes, the sameimagery, the same equine adoration crop up in Cormac McCarthy andLarry McMurtry, but Galvin has a lighter touch, eschewing myth for theminute particulars of hard work and hard luck in a singlecommunity. Galvin can also crack a good joke, even though he knows aswell as anyone that there's not a lot to laugh about under the big skythese days. --David Laskin ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Should'a been 5 Stars
I have a rule, or, rather, a practice of reading paperbacks and, if I find the book to be one that I know I will want to revisit repeatedly, and recommend to friends, I then buy the book in hardcover.When I was about three quarters of the way through Fencing the Sky I went to Amazon and ordered it in hardcover.Last night, when I finished it, I tried to cancel the order.

The author has a rare gift:he is able to make the reader feel the places, know the people, and understand both in a way that draws her or him into the reality of the modern, aging west.There are imperfect heroes and awkward villains, depicted in a way that causes the reader to want to know, to confront, both.All of this wrapped in a story that caused me, at least, to need to see the past that had formed the characters and led to the events that the ending would bring.

Which brings me to the ending, and to the reason I won't keep a hardcover copy of this book.All I'll say is that a character that I had come to know, to understand, and to relate to because of how well the author had captured the spirit, mores, and outlook of real westerners, suddenly and jarringly acts out of character.From there, a poorly constructed ending emerged.

It's worth reading, but it should have been worth buying in hardcover.

A new perspective
Being from New Jersey, and having a log cabin in upstate NY where I feel I have my own little piece of paradise, this book was a shot to the gut.

When rich city folk buy up most of the unclaimed land out west, and disrespect that land by tearing it up with dirtbikes and ATV's, and spook the cattle and make life hard for the ranchers who have lived there and made livings the hard, good ol' way, it made me change the way I felt about my own cabin. Seeing and feeling how disrespectful these newcomers were is greatly felt through the characters we get to know in this book.

Told through a series of flashbacks while our protagonist is fleeing from the law on horseback, we come to know and love the fugitive who was only standing up for his own moral rights. While this is the main outline for the plot, the deeper, real intention is the abuse the government forced upon landowners and ranchers in the west, claiming rights to dig up land regardless of ownership.

Overall, a sad story that hits home with impact and gives you chills as you turn the last few pages. I particularly enjoyed the last quarter of the book the most. Please read and try to understand the loss many landowners out west feel about the destruction of good land, turned into a 'wilderness escape' for wealthy personel.

But what a preposterous ending!
I love Wyoming, and Galvin brought me to tears more than once with his loving and poetic descriptions of the land, the people who want to protect it, and his indictment ofhorrible Takers and Users who see only dollar signs in that beauty.

Galvin's message about the land and the Wyoming rancher's fading way of life should be read and treasured.But stop reading this book when you reach Page 235. I wish I had.

PS:or read Galvin's beautiful "The Meadow," also about the Medicine Bow area.Its characters are the people who lived there (composites of them are in "Fencing"), and while the ending is sad, it's believable.

Brilliant Book
Exceptional book, beautifully written, powerful story. I've bought as a gift for others many times.

Excellent story, wrong hero
There is no denying that Galvin has weaved an excellent tale in this book.His writing and the story are excellent.You want to know more with each snippet of the story regarding what's going to happen. Even though the scene's change and you don't really want them to change, you are thrilled when they do change because each part of the story is very captivating.The only exception to this is the end of the story. I won't say what happened, but the end read to me as though Galvin got a call from his publisher saying, "Finish it or lose the contract."I felt myself having to totally suspend reality and belief at the end and in general thinking, "this just doesn't fit."

The major drawback to the story is that more often than not, I kept thinking that the hero in the story was missing.The person who is very clearly the 'hero' is not much more than a vigilante, and as such the glorifications of his actions are misplaced.Additionally, the story has as a general idea a lament for the loss of the small time rancher in Wyoming and Colorado.This is not a lament I share.The small time rancher in Wyoming has a great deal of political influence anddespite Galvin's depiction of them as hardworking honest folk who only want the best for the land, the political realities are often far from that depiction.

This is a book that will start conversations, especially if you are at all familiar with the current state of events in the Rocky Mountain region.By that standard alone this book does warrant five stars, but because I disagree so heavily with the thesis and because the ending is so poorly constructed, I have to give it four stars.

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Customer Reviews (2)

Contemporary American poetry at its best
This book has the most memorable lines per page of any English poetry I have read.Galvin has done a superb job of taking the concrete details of life on a Western ranch and made of them a universal exploration ofhistory, human surviving, practical theology.Poem after poem allowsreading and rereading without exhausting the poem's potential.

Opening atrandom - "The sound of me getting norwhere. / Though I'm telling youthere are mountains so distant / It hurts to look" - what a wonderfulimage "so distant it hurts" - over and over these concrete,straight-talking Western poems catch you up in a new way of looking at theworld - new questions, new potential answers.

Go West
These poems describe an internal landscape as lonesome and unknowable, and yet as inescapably beautiful, as the Wyoming in which they are (mostly) set. Camp a few days alone in the wilderness of the Rockies -- where the rest of the world can seem simply not matter, but where a brutal naturewill not let the world be ignored --and you'll know what I mean. Read"Three Sonnets" or "Everyone Knows Whom the Saved Envy"and you are in that wilderness. ... Read more

Product Description
At the heart of The Land's Wild Music is an examination of the relationship between writers and their. Interviewing four great American writers of place — Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin — author Mark Tredinnick considers how writers transmute the power of nature into words. Each author is profiled in a separate chapter written in rich, engaging prose that reads like the best journalism, and Tredinnick concludes with his own thoughts on what it takes to be "an authentic witness of place." ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Speaks on a wide array of subjects, with articulate verse
James Galvin brings fans of his previous work a treat with "As Is", his seventh collection of poetry. More of what Galvin excels at, his work speaks on a wide array of subjects, with articulate verse. "As Is" is a collection that many poetry fans will very much enjoy. "The Fall Guy": Hello?/Is this the Fall Guy?/Speaking./Did you take the fall?/It's what I do./So, you're in prison now?/You call it prison. Prison is my heaven,/My afterlife.

"As Is" is a stunning new book.
Galvin's latest book proves him to be among America's most original, talented and intellectually mature poets. ... Read more

Product Description

"X" is the kiss and betrayal, the embrace, the crucifixion, the mathematical unknown. In his sixth book of poems, James Galvin writes from a deep, philosophical engagement with the landscape and faces a "vertigo of solitude" with his marriage dissolved, his only daughter grown and gone, and the log house he built by hand abandoned. "What did I love that made me believe it would last?" he asks.

Something has to be true enough to be
Taken for granted.
In the hospital I saw
An old man
Caressing the face of an old woman.
This same man, young, caressed her face
In just that way.
That's the stillness
At the center of change --
A sadness worth dying for, I swear --
There is no other.
-- from "Dying into What I've Done"

"James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry." -- The Nation

"In James Galvin we have a superior poet." -- American Book Review

"Galvin's poems have the virtues of precise observation and original language, yes, but what he also brings to the table is a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make the slightest of his poems an architectural pleasure." -- Harvard Review

James Galvin has published five collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975 - 1997, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadow and a novel, Fencing the Sky. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he works as a rancher part of each year, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Customer Reviews (4)

Amazing Beautiful Vituperative Work; Galvin makes Poetry Real
This book of poetry moved me in a way that (post)-modern poetry doesn't.While I do know Galvin and his daughter, his writing has made me admire him as well as his strength of character and general demeanor.His writing matches his persona in this respect, and is notable as it's not cerebral, or convoluted-it's straightforward, brilliant, and beautiful--even in relating some of the most painful experiences he's endured.

Also, as a side note, Galvin writes a substantial amount of work in Iowa, where he's a professor at the famous University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.Not as inspiring as Wyoming, but a great place just the same, where many writers began their careers and wrote some of their best work.

A Nightingale In Wyoming
A long time has past since John Keats slouched beneath a nightingale's nest in a plum tree to bemoan a world "Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/and leaden-eyed despairs/Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes/Or new love pine at them beyond to morrow." In our cool age, merely to think of any contemporary poet attempting to revisit themes endemic to lyric poetry since Sappho-desire, betrayal, trust, loss, loneliness and nature-awakens us to just how awesome a challenge it has become to say "my heart aches" without encountering a sea of guffaws.

But there is a nightingale in Wyoming, perched on a windowsill somewhere around James Galvin's ranch, and, as his sixth volume of poetry attests, he hears it loud and clear. Throughout "X," a collection of poems dwelling largely on his defunct marriage with fellow poet Jorie Graham, Galvin relies on the reader's own conscience and experience to finish each poem's meaning and affect, often transcending this basic rule of poetic law by digging deeper, excavating past losses and interrogating the difficult present, the struggle to go on. "After bad things happen we always live/A little more," Galvin observes in a language as simple as it is moving.

Routinely, Galvin steps out of the way of his poems to let them speak their way out of loss, stifling so much as a jaded chuckle in the textured silence following every final line. If the trick to conveying heartbreak convincingly in contemporary poetry is to simply tell what happened, rather than wrestling readers into feeling your pain, "X" provides ample instruction:

So out of love with life am I
No future will have me.
How can you lose a lie?
Well, you can. Easy.
All those years together, it seems,
Were posturings of goodbye.
For a time I raved.
Now I dwell in moods and reveries
Like frightened birds-

Galvin's bursts of thwarted longing are calculated with such tact and precise timing that they leap off of the page. By the time he gets around to saying, simply, "You are in love with/someone else" or "Why aren't you in love with me," the stage has already been so patiently set for a heaving sigh of empathy that only the dead could turn the page without at least a quiver in the chin. "Everyone drifts/in their disastrous bodies," Galvin writes in the book's first poem, "Little Dantesque." Just midway into this opening poem, the reader already has little reason to suspect that Galvin's lines are anything less thanflakes chipped from a soul in smolder. "Love's not love until it's lost," he writes in a later poem. The body and its carriage of lusts has indeed proven disastrous, as the "threadbare" speaker continually "drifts" along an impasse of things that were: "I had a happy medium/Had her reading out of my palm/The circus folded up and left."

Inevitably, there are fleeting descents into mushiness and melodramatics, as when Galvin signs off the poem "Dear May Eight," "Yours, May Eighth /Sincerely/Man under influence of sky." Additionally, a couple of poems read less like verse and more like tongue-twisting transcripts from some spelling-bee:

Algorithmic,
Epigenetic,
He ciphers ciphers.

Generally, though, the poems in "X" demonstrate the talents of a master craftsmen, fraught with biting, alliterative moments of rhythm-"O wretched road in rain," "an inner din unending"- and heroic first lines that could eat through a cage, "This is the wave of gravel where she left me off the edge of my life" or "The whole night sky went bad in the knees." Further, from the villanelle "River Edged With Ice" to the end-rhymed "Dear Nobody's Business" or sprawling, long-lined masterpieces such as "Earthquake," "Leap Year" and "Depending on the Wind," Galvin's poetic range knows no end.

"Where Once I was not alone, now each/closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like/shadows at dusk," Galvin writes in "Depending on the Wind," a spare, precise eulogy to the house he built with his hands for a family fated to leave him, "Gone that arrangement of allegiances called family/we never really know before it ends/Like love itself, it isn't true till/then." Seemingly dizzy with crestfallen lines such as these, Galvin deftly skirts the boundary between authenticity and mawkishness, and whether it's a nightingale crooning on a nearby windowsill or a case of the old heartbreak that's got him down, James Galvin's "X" guarantees the sure rise of his stature.

Powerful, a bit single noted
Wonderful poet...I buy and read everything he writes, including his fiction/prose.Significant center section of this book is Galvin's (character's? or is it unabashedly autobiographical?) artful, moving...but ultimately 'one note'...crie de ceur about the betrayal of 'his'/his wife, implied divorce, and loss of daughter living in the same household. (I'm betting that in the somewhat small world of American poets there is a connection here to Galvin's previous marriage to another poet.) I suspect that when there is a selected poems, some of these will be retained, others dropped.The stronger poems are effective from every perspective.I was glad to see that some of Galvin's earlier concerns about the larger natural world appear here in the collection as well.

Best
Amazing, beautiful, heartfelt and lyrically stunning.This work may not only mark a personal best for the author, but for the decade as well.One to read and one to remember.To be honest, there is nothing to say but what is said, and so I'll be brief:don't miss it. ... Read more

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A collection of inspiring Bible passages that parents can share with their children. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Our favorite book
My children and I love to read this book!It is a great way to help them learn scripture and the pictures are adorable.

beautifully illustrated inspirational book for toddlers
I read this book to my daughter when she's settling down for bedtime. Each page contains an illustration and a scripture passage representing one of God's promises. The bible reference is also given under the scripture. At the back of the book, there are approx. 6 prayers that you can pray with your little one. It is a lovely, small book that captures their attention and teaches them God's word. Wonderful for adults too!

Thank you Prayers: My Saviour
This book is great for young children now learning about praising Jesus and remembering to say Thank You for all the wonderful things given to them by God.It is a constant reminder that God is always here and he protectsand guides each of us, Jesus said " And be sure of this: I am with youalways, even to the end of the age." The illustrations are justwonderful they depict harmony among children regardless of colour or raceit also gives a little charater they can relate with. ... Read more

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New technologies and services have created explosive demand for radio spectrum, which is outstripping supply. Fortunately, these same technologies can provide the solution. More intensive use would meet existing and potential demand and could be the basis for unprecedented economic growth. ... Read more

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The Questions Children Ask series has been a helpful teaching tool for hundreds of thousands of families. This eighth and latest book gives valuable answers to questions about friends, school, and situations related to popularity. The delightful cartoons, clever questions, and scriptural answers provide both a solid base and broad appeal. ... Read more

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Direct, scriptural answers to kids' curiosity about God's Word will help parents use these challenging questions in guiding children toward a deeper awareness of Bible truths.

Spanish available ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A great reference tool for kids!
I ordered this as an addition to our resource "library" for my children as we do Bible study daily... I have four children ranging in age from 2 - 8 and if I find it difficult to explain something to them pertaining to the Bible in language they can understand, I can often find an easier way to get the message across by finding answers to their questions in this book. I would recommend it!

Fun for the whole family, and interesting!
I bring home a lot of Christian books that I think my kids will read, but they rarely do. This one is different...my 8 and 10 yr olds are truly interested.They like to ask me the questions and see what kind of answerI come up with.With the scripture included, it's a devotional study indisquise! ... Read more

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Complete with application notes, thought-provoking questions, and relevant Scripture passages, the Life Application Topical Studies are perfect for group leaders, teachers, or anyone looking for spiritual insight on today's important issues.

Each Bible study guide contains six lessons on the featured topic. Key Bible verses are presented in three different versions of the Bible (King James Version, New International Version, and New Living Translation) so readers can choose which translation they want to use, or compare and contrast different versions.

Discussion questions help readers think about practical ways to apply the truth of the Bible to everyday life. ... Read more

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Larger easy to read print complete with almost 400 color illustrations and photos. Makes the Bible come alive for all ages! ... Read more

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This devotional, which contains 52 selected verses as featured in the Life Application Bible for Students, offers an interesting new way to look at Scripture. Each devotional includes an inspirational or application note. ... Read more