Painstaker: Poems

In Painstaker Galbraith takes stock of life building an inventory of faith regret travel parenthood and hardship both physical and mental. These poems live in cities but remember the farm with subjects ranging from fatherhood and machinery accidents to the uncertainties of faith. Galbraith calls on a number of absentees who are deceased divine distant or too intimately known including loved ones lost friends and a lobster soon to be dinner. As the title suggests Painstaker understands that the act of paying attention to the details is no easy task and yet therein lies the reward. The elegantly parsed anecdotes observations and recollections comprising Painstaker manifest a keen and compelling desire to witness within the puzzlements of common life a pulse of consolation an arc of purpose the deep bass notes of hope and joy. --Scott Cairns author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems There is continuous great authority in the writing of this book evidenced throughout in the skill of the free verse so variously expressive and so true to the experiences described. The latter half of the book is a series of poems about the death by calamitous sickness of a friend who from childhood like a brother was a fellow teacher fellow poet and side-by-side fellow human being. It is one of the most extraordinary such kinship sequences ever written; its intensity of compassion and pain comes not from mere store-bought declaration but from the painstaking continuous skill in the truth-telling of the lines. --David Ferry author of Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations winner of the National Book Award for Poetry Jeffrey Galbraith is Assistant Professor of English at Wheaton College Illinois. He earned his doctorate in English Literature from Indiana University and his MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. His poetry has appeared in Southern Humanities Review Florida Review RHINO Yemassee and the Cresset.