Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls by John Gallaher

Winner of the 2000 Spuyten Duyvil Book Award

. . . Prufrock goes to a party, but in his head he's in Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,”
all glorious and all orange, wishing he had the goofy wit of Paul Muldoon. 
And John Gallaher has this.  The poem, made up of rituals and objects of no
consequence (and therefore always more consequential), is a space like other
familiar spaces (drawing rooms, lawns, poolsides, verandas) where we play out
certain varieties of suburban anxieties.  So we turn, seething in our settledness,
to the exquisite everyday landscape of the poem as we turn to our own reflection,
or your own reflection, or that absent reflection obscured by the martini olive . . .
Gallaher gives us these all-too public spaces and poems.  And this poem and this
poem, blessings each, in their perpetual present tense, as we place ourselves and
all that impinges on ourselves (being and not being) in the momentary security of
parenthesis.  Because the words aren’t the thing.      George Hartley


The technique employed here is not so much presenting the reflected world in its
shard-like state, but a dogged attempt at saying the world as directly and wholly
as possible. By neither pretending wholeness, nor embracing the fragmented language
as if it were good enough, John Gallaher is producing a powerful new kind of poem.    Bin Ramke