The Meadow: a novel-poem

A friend lent me The Meadow (1992) by James Galvin a few months ago. I didn't realize it would be such a masterpiece, but poets have been outside of my sphere, unfortunately.

It is a devastating work set in the Colorado/Wyoming borderland, a region where Galvin himself was raised. Only a living intimacy could create the work, a 100-year history of the area depicted through the lives of several interconnected generations of families. Part of the charm is the omniscient narrator's perspective; Galvin dances in and out of his characters' lives and thoughts - both contextualizing them and allowing the characters to express the searing, what appears to be one slow-drawn, wagon-through-mud-consistent drama of their harsh-landscape life. The revolving perspectives and simple, rugged intimacy recalls, strongly, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

When the moment ebbed and the horses stilled and the situation bespoke itself in the silence that followed (even the creek's roar was a silence now), the silence issuing from the old man overwhelmed it, and the creek became a noise again, and the roaring in App's ears came out of it, and all the sounds together became the sound of his father's wrath building. App knew what was coming so he just sat there waiting, still as granite, not from fear but from a calm prescience of the inevitable. Without turning he heard the old man's breathing and the crunch of his boots punishing the gravel. He felt the back end of the wagon lift perceptibly, which was not what he was expecting, so he craned around to see the old man squatted down behind the wagon, heaving-to in a carnival-like attempt to lift the impossible back onto the road (51).

Tempering different grades of steel is a subtle art that can't be explained in any book. People see colors differently, so that the relationships of colors as they shade down a metal rainbow from red to purple to tan, can only be hinted at. It takes years and failures to learn (123).

He scoured the desert for agates and jade. He made a saw to cut slabs out of stones. He filled several boxes with the cut and polished jewelry he made. Some of the agates are like tiny landscapes with trees and a river or distant mountains under dawn. All women's jewelry - pendants, brooches, earrings - never given or worn. Put away in boxes in a drawer (126).

In the spring the new grass grows in standing water. At sunset the white mirror-light shines through the grass. That's when the beaver ponds light up, too, and the rising trout make bull's eyes on the surface.
A doe that has been drinking lifts her head to listen. Done irrigating, Lyle heads home across the shining field. He has a shovel on his shoulder that looks like a single wing (142).