TY - JOUR
AU - Anderson, Daniel Gustav
AB - BOO K REVIEW S Place Keepers. By Brendan Galvin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2003. 64 pp. Cloth $22.95. Paper $15.95. Place Keepers offers an overwhelming celebration of consumption. Two representative lines from "Mushrooms" demonstrate Brendan Galvin's catalogued world of "oysters and a strew of lemons / sliced, a chocolate cone" (15-16). Where Baudelaire consumes biedermeier home decor, Galvin consumes food and landscape. There are whole poems dedicated to potatoes, apples, mussels—and gazing at things, masticat- ing with the eyes. While Galvin aches for oatmeal, birds eat mice and peck at the dog's coat, deer eat junipers in the snow, and fire swallows a barn whole. In a telling moment of synesthesia, Galvin finds a place on his palate in "Vaticum": "This morning / I'm tasting Sweeney's Ho- tel in Donegal" (8-9). The gaze of the gentle and affable speaker bites, chews, and swallows places. Overeating becomes a symptom of desire for goods, and to identify with commodities. In "Catalogue Dreams," Galvin uses a mail-order furniture catalogue as a medium for meditating on human aspiration: "We all want to be durable / And retain our lustrous sheen" (14-15). Gaz- ing at the catalogue, the poet contemplates this state of 
TI - Place Keepers
JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/12.2.267
DA - 2005-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/place-keepers-4dRNtIp2SQ
SP - 267
EP - 268
VL - 12
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -