Dear Ghosts,: Poems - Softcover

Gallagher, Tess

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974937 ISBN 13: 9781555974930

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2008

Synopsis

"It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images." --Joyce Carol Oates

Time
to put our arms around each other's waists―my man,
my woman, my unapproachable dream.
―from "Dear Ghosts,"

In Dear Ghosts,―Tess Gallagher's seventh collection, now in paperback―
the ghosts of the past are conjured and communed with as part of the poet's 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 new love and friendship in these spare lyrics and sprawling narratives, each punctuated by her feisty resilience and signature grace.

About this title

About the Author:

Tess Gallagher is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, screenwriter, 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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1555974937
• ISBN 13: 9781555974930
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80