NORTH STREET

A collection that reflects the elegance of the East Coast intellectual and the introspection of the middle-aged family man in

equal measure. The president of the Academy of American Poets, Galassi has published one previous volume of poetry (Morning Run, 1988) and translated three books of Eugenio Montale’s verse. The tone he strikes here is intimate, contemplative, and elegiac, enfolding a commitment to life and loved ones that pulses through it like an arterial flow: its passions are suggestive of Dante in their intensity—only Dante would have had to marry Beatrice and raise a family with her to write along such lines. Much in the tradition of his fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman, Galassi celebrates the harbor as a metaphor of both youth and death, filled as it inevitably is with ships "who’ve seen mutinies, battles, embraces, / fires and flotillas and yet keep soldiering (sailoring) on, as if life were only / this slipping away from the dock and making off / to the destinations defined by their speed and capacity." Poems about September, youth ("it falls through the fingers / like money we thought we had"), inheritance ("here where it is all right to be rich"), and death ("No one ever claimed that life is fair / what comes after is a rougher sport") set the stage for "Total Maturity" ("The trick is how / to amortize remorse, desire, and dread. / Eyes ahead, companions: Life is Now. / The serious years are opening ahead").

A lyric collection by a seasoned hand moving through his prime of life.