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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 57 > Reviews >Rachel Galvin's Pulleys & Locomotion

Pulleys & Locomotion
Rachel Galvin
Black Lawrence Press
ISBN Number: 978-1-934703-72-4

Reviewer: James Owens


          Rachel Galvin’s poems speak from a shtetl of the spirit, seeming to move outward from their origins in some vaguely Eastern European village, imbued with folk-life and tradition, and through successive layers of worldly distance and diaspora, without ever forgetting their starting place. Galvin’s sensibility, the stories that persist through memory and the persona that brings them forward, often recalls the whimsically skew, half-surreal worlds of Charles Simic or Aleksandar Hemon, though her wide-ranging and intimate voice is her own.

          In the book’s first poem, “Village of Pulleys & Locomotion,” the machinery of Galvin’s vision is already activated.
A man used to arrive from afar,
give each child a whistle, and parade them
through the village, whistling.

What is this fury of forms, boarding
trains, handing out whistles to children?
          The question interrogates more than the traveling whistle-giver, opening the poem to a wider context. The next few lines bring in allusions to the Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander and the trees in the Garden of Eden, reminding a reader of other, proffered explanations for the “fury of forms” that have remained, perhaps, unsatisfying, little more than preludes to more restless wondering. In the end,
A village elder goes on debating
with his god. Who can tell if he receives a reply?

In the old stories, if you whistled,
the light would come to you
out of curiosity.
          Movement is important to these poems, as the title of the book would suggest—the literal movement of the train that carries the whistle-man to the village and carries others away—as the poems range the earth from Florida to Paris to Jerusalem to Denmark and other places. But equally important, as several poems make clear, is the cinematic illusion of movement as an answer to the mind’s hunger for finding, or making, sense out of the possibly chaotic data offered by one’s surroundings. “Inventive eye, that through this narrow slit/ joins world to world,” Galvin exclaims in “When the Vision Comes, the Eye’s Engine Will Sequence Clarity.” The poem continues,
Eye and mind collude, I forget
I sit in obscurity, breath held
as the heroine focuses binoculars—
in this theater of distance

I blink binary into pulsation,
hummingbird’s thrum unaccounted,
static points of light smoothed
into motion, suspension, nexus.
          “How to Build Your Own Zoetrope,“ a poem at the heart of Pulleys & Locomotion, addresses the eye’s ability to stitch the images of film—which are, in reality, a rapid series of stills—into apparent motion, as a metaphor for the mind that observes and gathers the discrete moments of memory, or the membra disjecta of the world, and renders from them a narrative, an arc of meaning.
Rely on your eye for illusion of motion.
Today we will stride where yesterday
was only space: the crux of mechanic cinema.

These words, these apertures. Will later reveal
your handiwork. Do you see the waters withdraw?
Rely on your eye for illusion.

…

Figures move naturally at fourteen frames
per second and if you have pictured me,
at this rate I will always move toward you,

years hence, luminous, blurred
with expectation. Rely on it:
motion lies in the eye. The rest of us are still.
          An aspect of Jewish tradition that flows through this book from beginning to end is a reverence for language that verges at times on mystical devotion. “Quietus” advises: “Recite the alphabet/ end to end until it ignites into prayer. In the shtetl/ they knew it….” Galvin even includes a poem dedicated to the gene that makes possible the uniquely human ability for speech, and which differs from the DNA of the chimpanzee by only “two molecules,/ a gear and a lever, to grant the soul// its ventriloquy. To answer ‘Here I am.’/ Or not,” remembering, subtly in this very scientific context, both Abraham’s prompt reply to his calling by Yahweh and Adam’s earlier failure to make the same response.

          Language leads—perhaps naturally, perhaps inevitably—to prayer. One of the most impressive and resonant poems in this book is “Invitations to the God,” a list-poem of imagined letters to God placed in the Western Wall in Jerusalem. It seems to echo the “village elder” who was “debating with his god” in the opening poem.
Missives buried or burned, set like mortar
in the wall: written in grease,
letter of the mute child, letter that leans

on one leg, the flammable letter, the letter
weighing seven stone. Letter whose eyes
cannot open in the face of love. Written in milk,

sculpted on a potter’s wheel. Akin
to crow’s feet, redolent of dreams,
of unpaid bills, in mid coitus. Letter

on its knees….
          And so on for a full page of letters, inventive and surprising and sometimes wrenching in their tenderness.

          Pulleys & Locomotion is Rachel Galvin’s first book (she was a graduate student at Princeton when it was published in 2009), but it is hard to imagine that it would be her last. Fresh and intelligent, in love with their language as much as with their subjects, not afraid to take risks and able to make the risks pay off, these are poems that will make a space for themselves in the landscape of American poetry, where readers will discover them with pleasure, returning to them many times for further experiences and deeper inspirations.
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