Dear Ghosts,: Poems - Hardcover

Gallagher, Tess

3.91

137 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555974430 ISBN 13: 9781555974435

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2006

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The long-awaited and resplendent new poetry collection by Tess Gallagher, whose poems "are a gift of a poet's heart and soul to her readers" (Robert Coles)

Don't sharpen them.
Expectation, more dangerous
than any blade.
―"Knives in the Borrowed House"

Fourteen years after Moon Crossing Bridge―Tess Gallagher's powerful elegies for her husband, Raymond Carver―Dear Ghosts, is the return of Gallagher's unequivocal voice. In these new poems, the ghosts of the past are conjured as part of the present day: the deceased beloved, the father long dead, the ailing mother, the victims of holocaust and war. With these spirits beside her, Gallagher confronts her own illness and mortality, and celebrates love and friendship in these spare lyrics and muscular narratives, each punctuated by her resilience and grace. Here is the new work by one of America's most accomplished poets.

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About the Author:

Tess Gallagher is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, screenplay writer, and translator. Her previous poetry collections include Moon Crossing Bridge and Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Gallagher, a cherished poet and short story writer, evokes the power of the unseen as well as the seen with breathtaking clarity, creating metaphors so surprising, radiant, and apt that the world seems to expand in their wake. This sense of opening is intrinsic to Gallagher's new poems. Substantial yet lambent, earthy and spiritual, these are her best works in an already incandescent oeuvre. The collection begins with "My Unopened Life," a poem charged with fairy-tale magic as a place setting on a tablecloth acquires cosmic dimension. In another worlds-within-world poem, "Oil Spot," Gallagher writes, "The door to beauty always / stands open." The indiscriminate wounds of war are the subject of startlingly precise reflections on her World War II-era childhood and on the Vietnam War, and both life and death are palpably present in ravishing poems of Vancouver, Ireland, Romania, and Egypt. Losing her hair during cancer treatments summons up contrasting visions of the women of Auschwitz and Buddhist monks. Gallagher remembers her mother and her late husband, Raymond Carver, and finds enlightenment in birds, the moon, rain, dusk, and lilacs. So compelling are Gallagher's graceful poems, they leave the reader feeling "rearranged from the cells out." Donna Seaman
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