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See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Galvanized came to me courtesy of Green Writers Press in Vermont (an exciting new publishing company about which I'll be telling you more very soon). It arrived at the perfect moment, since my intention is to focus on poetry and drama during this month for my Reading New England Challenge, and I was looking to explore some contemporary voices of the region. I was so glad to meet a new-to-me poet through this marvelously rich and rewarding collection, which gathers selections from seven volumes of poetry published between 1991 and 2014, along with thirteen new poems.
Leland Kinsey's Vermont roots go deep, as his Scottish ancestors settled there in the 1800s, and he grew up on the family farm. The hard work of rural living forms the bedrock of his poetry, which often deals with seemingly prosaic actions and events: repairing a chimney, making pickles, pulling weeds. Violence and injury are not uncommon motifs – one poem is descriptively titled “Small Wounds and Minor Ailments”; another begins “The whitewashed walls were smeared with blood / the day the bull rampaged inside the barn” (from “Surviving Bulls”). Kinsey's spare, restrained style embraces and contains these extremes of experience, both the sensational and the mundane, while delivering insights that are visceral, unsentimental, luminous and raw.
