The Vineyard

“A heartening long poem about the fruits of a life—cultivated through experience, refined by love and labor, and gratified with leisure and beauty. ‘I’ve hung my garden tools on the wall / under the arbor,’ the speaker writes, ‘my trophies, my insignia of life and time.’ Weaving narratives of relationships, books, and houses, with refreshing candor and compassionate demeanor, the Galassi of The Vineyard is the best company, scintillating and tender. A pleasure, a wonder, an awakening to live alongside it.” —Richie Hofmann, author of The Bronze Arms

“The Vineyard is an unexpectedly redemptive book. Its long title poem unfolds as a love letter to the same island that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, opens along the way to reflect the author’s personal, yet representative sentimental education, continues in tribute to tutelary friends and neighbors, and becomes finally a testament to the ever timely power of the pastoral as a humanizing ideal. Galassi couldn’t have known when writing it just how timely, but the poem knew, which is what a poet is for.” —Douglas Crase, author of The Revisionist & The Astropastorals

“[Galassi] revitalizes the pastoral tradition in this luscious, witty, and poignant book-length poem chronicling a summer in a Long Island village he calls Oyster Ponds. . . . Everything flows and flowers in supple lines sparkling with nature’s palette as well as the hues and shades of thoughts and feelings. Elegies and other poems-within-the-poem spring up, concluding with a celebration of a marriage. Candid, bemused, grateful, and awed, Galassi embraces moments painful, joyful, and wonderfully ordinary.” —Booklist

“Watchful and intelligent. . . . By turns appreciative and elegiac as the poet ruminates on place and the changing seasons, lending memorializing and pastoral notes to spare meditations. . . . This pulses with feeling beneath its placid surface.” —Publishers Weekly