With its core poems composed in the U.S. South of the 1960s, Hawk on Galvez plumbs the inner depths of the racial injustice that has cursed this country since its founding, assuming a wide range of registers to unveil the double-speak of polite society as no more enlightened than the vernacular racism of the klan. More politically engaged than Michael Whitt's previous poetry about the natural world, the manuscript for Hawk on Galvez lingered in a file cabinet for half a century before its rediscovery at a time in U.S. history when the same founding racial disparities that the poet writes has "never been resolved, reconciled, nor atoned for" had bubbled back to the forefront of public consciousness, unleashed in part by a leader proud of his unbridled bigotry. Michael Whitt writes with a physician's eye for detail and the bedside manner of a lyric poet whose love for his country informs his critique of her discontents. Hawk on Galvez is a book whose time has finally come.
