Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (Poets On Poetry)

This bittersweet collection of diary entries, memoirs, essays, letters, and poetry celebrates the marriage and literary partnership of the late fiction writer Raymond Carver (1938---1988) and the poet Tess Gallagher. Soul Barnacles is both literary history and love story, chronicling the way a surviving partner carries forward the life and work of her mate while pursuing her own life and literary endeavors. These essays, letters, and interviews, written after Carver's untimely death, explore the inextricable bonds that linked their lives and their writing.
The book opens with excerpts from a journal of the couple's last trip to Europe and a selection of Gallaghers introductions to Carver's posthumous collections. The next section focuses primarily on Gallagher's engagement with the filming of Short Cuts, a film directed by Robert Altman and based on Carver's short stories. Gallagher's recounting provides a rare, quietly dramatic look at a poet's experience in Hollywood, determined to see the dignified transformation of one art form into another. Following are a number of interviews that touch on the grieving process, the solitude and intensity of a writer's life, and the ways in which Gallagher's relationship with Carver has continued to evolve, even after death. The collection, richly illustrated with photographs of Carver and Gallagher during their all-too-brief time together, ends with "I Asked That a Prayer," an original poem by Tess Gallagher, and a complete listing of the published work of this remarkable literary couple.
Tess Gallagher's poetry collections include Portable Kisses, Instructions to the Double, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Willingly. She is also author of the short-story collections At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and the essay collection A Concert of Tenses.

Before writer Raymond Carver swore off alcohol forever, a friend of his called him "the most unhappy man I'd ever met," and even the author himself spoke of that period as "the Bad Raymond days." Between October 1976 and January 1977, Carver was hospitalized four times for acute alcoholism, but, on June 2, 1977, he stopped drinking and fewer than six months later met fellow writer Gallagher, who became his soulmate until his death in 1988 at age 50. Gallagher dealt with her ragged grief at Carver's passing in the poetry collection Moon Crossing Bridge; and this new book takes a more distanced view of their relationship. The journal entries, letters, forewords to books, interviews, and essays gathered here don't pretend to afford a systematic view of their life together, but individual pieces result in a more profound depth of perception that any system could ever provide. Soul Barnacles will find an obvious audience in students of contemporary literature, but its various parts tell a larger story of love and loss, ruin and repair; it details a relationship so intense, both before and after the death of one of its members, as to be more than of merely critical interest.DDavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.