Galvin’s poems document a communion with landscape, questioning humanity’s ability to cope with losses both universal and deeply personal. The publisher notes that his poetry “portrays the solitude, spectacle and ruggedness of the rural American West in an unsentimentally vulnerable voice. In the Yellowstone Building conference center at 7 p.m., Galvin shares his work from his most recent book of poetry, “Everything We Always Knew Was True,” which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2016.

28, as a part of the Northwest College Writers Series. They have achieved a right relationship to their environment.James Galvin-author of seven books of poetry and often considered one of the great writers of the American West-presents a poetry reading, Thursday, Sept. 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