Gallagher, Tess

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Half genius. Half... not.
The Best of American Poetry
She just keeps on getting better
Featuring poems in which ghosts of the past are summoned and discoursed with in the present day

Dear Ghosts,: Poems
Tess Gallagher
Manufacturer: Graywolf Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Moon Crossing Bridge
In the Middle Distance
After: Poems
What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver
Amplitude: New and Selected Poems

ASIN: 1555974430
Release Date: 2006-05-02

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

Half genius. Half... not........2006-10-17

Tess Gallagher, Dear Ghosts, (Graywolf, 2006)

Tess Gallagher, when she's writing intensely personal, imagist poems, is perhaps one of America's better poets currently working. And about half of Dear Ghosts, is comprised of exactly this sort of thing. Unfortunately, the reader must also contend with the other half of the book, which treads, and sometimes falls flat on its face over, the line of message poetry, over which very few poets can walk and still produce anything even remotely related to poetry. Worth reading, but beware a few pitfalls here and there. ***

The Best of American Poetry.......2006-10-16

You can do nothing better for yourself than to read Dear Ghosts,. Tess Gallagher has always been among the best of American poets. Her most recent work continues to add jewels to the crown of great poetry. As the poems engage us, we become aware why poetry is so necessary to the human spirit. Dear Ghosts, opens us to emotion. Within its enacted drama, we walk the difficult but necessary terrain of reaching out to others, thereby realizing ourselves. Finally, Gallagher explores the frontier of language itself, continually reminding us that in words we discover self. The best books of poetry, no matter how deeply we linger and meditate, no matter how we value them for their ability to yield in reading after reading, are also page-turners, and this is a book, once begun, you won't want to put down. And one you'll pick up again, year after year.--Alice Derry, Peninsula College

She just keeps on getting better.......2006-10-06

A book of poems by Tess Gallagher is an event. They're beautifully presented and beautifully written. And they are powerful. The poet doesn't seem satisfied to write about pretty things; she wants her poems to matter. And they do. Poems about murderers and refugees and sad, tragic lives; poems about war and childhood and marriages and joy; and poems about the dead (those "dear ghosts"): a sparrow, her father, her mother, her husband. This is a book to savor. Read it slowly, then read it again. And again. It's so easy to miss the nuances, the subleties. Tess Gallagher writes of enormous themes, and she does so in small and striking language - intimately. You will devour this book and crave to "take the next bite / and say, I believe it."

Featuring poems in which ghosts of the past are summoned and discoursed with in the present day.......2006-05-06

Published fourteen years after the author's previous poetry book, Dear Ghosts is the seventh collection and long-awaited return of Tess Gallagher's poetic voice. Featuring poems in which ghosts of the past are summoned and discoursed with in the present day, Dear Ghosts speaks with such spectral figures as the deceased beloved, the long-dead father, and victims of holocaust and war. Gallagher confronts her own aging, illness, and mortality with grace, modesty, and good humor in this insightful and reflective collection. "Knives in the Borrowed House": Don't sharpen them. / Expectation, more dangerous / than any blade.

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Cathedrals
Raymond Carver , and Tess Gallagher
Manufacturer: Water Row Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories
Short Cuts: Selected Stories
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories
A New Path to the Waterfall
Cathedral

ASIN: 8888361022

Book Description

"Cathedrals" is a volume of work by and about both Raymond Carver (1938-1988) and his wife, writer Tess Gallagher. Carver's famous short story, "Cathedral", is included as well as Gallagher's short story, "Rain Flooding Your Campfire". Also featured is an extensive interview with Tess Gallagher as well as a bibliography and album of scarce photographs.

Twenty years ago, on a train, Raymond Carver wrote "Cathedral" - a story based on the time his wife Tess's blind friend came to visit them in their home in Syracuse, New York. The same episode also inspired "Rain Flooding Your Campfire" by Tess Gallagher. The birth, Fate and complete versions of these two short stories are a tribute to contemporary literature.

Customer Reviews:

A wonderful collection.......2006-11-04

Gravy and Late Fragment are two of the most beautiful and powerful poems I know . . . .

The last poems . . ........2005-06-10

This was Raymond Carver's 11th and apparently last book of poems, published after his death by his wife Tess Gallagher, who writes a long, thoughtful introduction describing Carver's last months before dying of cancer at age 50. Unlike his previous collection, "Where Water Comes Together With Other Water," this book has a number of poems that are more dream-like and surreal, the references not always easy to grasp. There are story poems that resemble the characters and situations in his short stories. And there are brief selections from the writings and poems of Anton Chekhov, Czeslaw Milosz, and others, which provide an allusive context of ideas and images for Carver's own poems.

There is the usual melancholy and awareness of death in these poems, made more riveting by the knowledge of the poet's awareness of his own approaching death. Reading his words and apprehending the emotions they convey, you find yourself treasuring deeply your own living moments - all of them, ordinary or extraordinary as they may be.

The poems are variations on related themes, ideas and observations captured and rendered in a wide variety of moods. There is sad bitterness in a poem about his son, "On an Old Photograph Of My Son." There are memories of boyhood in Yakima and a memoir-like fragment in "Some Prose on 'Poetry'," describing a stranger's gift of poetry books to him at an impressionable age. "His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed With Notes" is a playful catalog of random thoughts entertained and then dismissed as "horsing around." Another poem, rich with evocative detail, illustrates the creative process, "The Painter & the Fish." There are love poems, a sadly humorous poem about his toes, and a poem about the excesses of Alexander the Great.

It's a fine book, a great reminder of things that really matter - of living the dwindling days wholeheartedly.

'' beloved on the earth" .......2005-04-05

This is Raymond Carver's last collection of poems. It was put together with the help of the love and companion of the last eleven years of his life, the writer Tess Gallagher. She also includes a long introduction to the work explaining the process of the book's making.
Carver is a poet of directness, simplicity, emotional courage. His poems are often stories built around direct observations or statements of his present mood, a mood that is also reflective on other times of life. The poems which I believe are most moving often have to do with relationships, with his father, with his former wife, with his children.
His world is often a disordered and painful one, the alcoholic's world , the world of those in debt and down. But there is in him almost always a redemptive appreciation of life, a certain hidden joy and emotional surprise which gives the poems their special life.
Among the beautiful poems of this work is one called 'Cherish' in which he tells of the tenderness in his relationship with Tess Gallagher.
I was very moved by the last poem , a fragment that sums up the man and the redemptive power of his work.

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

The Style is the Man.......2003-02-12

Raymond Carver, whom I had the fortuitous pleasure of having lunch with, along with his girfriend Tess Gallagher, a couple of years before he died, was a true artist. Emily Dickinson puts poets above the sun and God in pantheon of what's most important, and people like Raymond Carver prove her right. Although this last offering by the 20th century's greatest minimalist writer is neither his greatest nor his most minimal, it strikes the same generous chord of longing, of heart warming simplicity and heart breaking honesty, that Carver strikes elsewhere. The style is the man, wrote Buffon (in French), and sure enough that is the case here: a style of simple emotional honesty, combined with an artist's experimental will to playfulness, sufffused with a hope whose transcendent beauty is precisely its distillation from the undoctored elements of ordinary reality. This book, enhanced and completed by Tess Gallagher's wonderfully loving but unsentimental introduction, shows Carver at the end of his life; still excited about art, and the possibility of the poem form, he splices lines from Chekov stories, giving them titles and thereby
transforming them into poem epigraphs to his own measured prose. The transformation of the Chekov short story to the Carver poem perhaps underscores the poetic process itself, whittling down reality into its artistic essence--the process so aptly demonstrated by Carver, who never wrote a novel, in his short stories. As Salmon Rushdie says on the cover (I paraphrase), read this book by Carver. Read everything by Carver. Raymond Carver was a great writer.

The Style is the Man.......2003-02-12

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Swept Away!
A lovely book!!!
Powerful images, delicately written about

Amplitude: New and Selected Poems
Tess Gallagher
Manufacturer: Graywolf Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Moon Crossing Bridge
Dear Ghosts,: Poems
The Way It Is
Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993 (Wesleyan Poetry)
All of Us: The Collected Poems

ASIN: 1555971105

Customer Reviews:

Swept Away!.......2000-06-16

She has a voice I've never heard before that I've needed to hear for a long, long time. There is unflinching lucidity here and honesty. "Each Bird Walking" takes no prioners. "The Hug" is. "If Poetry Were Not a Morality" is my memory too. The Fireman from Brooklyn glitters with hard truth

A lovely book!!!.......1999-07-31

This is one of my favorite books of poetry. Ms. Gallagher's style (phrasing, imagery) is very unique and her voice is both strong and delicate. You will not be disappointed with this book.

Powerful images, delicately written about.......1998-07-08

This book is a collection of poems from "Under Stars," "Instructions to the Double," "Willingly," and several dozen new poems. It's lovely, a joy to read. My favorites are from "Under Stars," and the poem "Under Stars," is worth the price of the book itself. Tess Gallagher's poems are stunning and strong, with such delicate phrasing. A must-read if you enjoy poetry.

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Willingly
Tess Gallagher
Manufacturer: Graywolf Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Under Stars
Tess Gallagher
Manufacturer: Graywolf Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0915308207

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simply beautiful
Moon Crossing
Poems certainly worthy of highest praise...
An extraordinarily complex and daring book of elegies

Moon Crossing Bridge
Tess Gallagher
Manufacturer: Graywolf Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Dear Ghosts,: Poems
Amplitude: New and Selected Poems
Portable Kisses
After: Poems
Averno: Poems

ASIN: 1555971563

Amazon.com

Tess Gallagher's poems in this collection chart the painful road of mourning, memory, and change following the death of her beloved husband, fiction writer Raymond Carver. From feelings of sharing death to memories of valentines they gave each other, and then in an upward arch through Zen imagery of cherry blossoms and curved bridges, Gallagher's poems come to no easy rest on the banks of a new life and new loves. But for all those who have experienced tragedy, the poems relate a common assurance that a crossing into survival can be reached.

Book Description

Tess Gallagher, one of America's most accomplished poets, presents her sixth book, a descent into the world of the dead, a remembrance of her recently deceased beloved, whose presence and absence are recalled in sombre lyrical rhythms and with a extraordinary range of expressions of love and sadness.

Devoid of self-pity or illusion, yet full of dream and vision and wisdom, these beautifully intense and powerful poems bestow the gift of words to the widow's silence, to the silence of all who are muted by grief and loss. With this unusual volume, arranged in six carefully paced movements to suggest the journey from death to recovery, Gallagher charges language with its utmost responsibilities: here poetry aspires deeply and urgently beyond its cultural marginality to embrace the paradox of sharing unshareable pain and to assume again an Orphic voice and a communal necessity.

Customer Reviews:

simply beautiful.......2004-02-20

WOW!!!!! what imagery, heart and beauty..Tess Gallagher's tribute
book to her deceased husband Raymond Carver,is the words of a grieving angel.."Deaf Poem" is my favorite.moon over bridge will
go down in history as one of the great book of poems dealing with
love,lost and renewal again..and i couldnt help thinking after reading it,how truly blessed Mr Carver was to have a love like
Tess in his life..and every man would be blessed to have a lady
love them just a tenth as much as she did..and does..pick up
this book!!!!!you wont regret it..

Moon Crossing.......2001-06-18

This is a great book of poems written near the time of her husband's death. I read the review of this book and purchased it for a friend whose husband had died. Now, 5 years later, she still tells me how much she loved this book and how much it meant to her. This is a great book. It is particularly wonderful for someone who has lost their husband.

Poems certainly worthy of highest praise..........2000-01-12

The passion and imagery contained in this book of highly personal poems astounds! I hope Ms. Gallagher's book will gain the recognition it deserves. To allow us to come so close to the poet seems to be a rarity in much of today's poetry. This incredible sharing will grab you and not let go. Our thanks to Ms. Gallagher . . .

An extraordinarily complex and daring book of elegies.......1999-07-09

Gallagher, whose decade-long relationship with the great short story writer Raymond Carver ended with Carver's early death to cancer in 1987, has written a masterpiece. Largely underrecognized, Moon Crossing Bridge has yet to receive its full due as one of the most deeply thoughtful and passionate poetic works on the subject of loss to emerge in recent memory. Gallagher has allowed the language that rose from her grief to carry her into the mystery that constitutes the borderland between the dead and those left behind. Her words sway like the tough threads of a hammock strung between the two worlds, holding us aloft as we allow ourselves to risk belief in paradoxical truths: that in the poetic universe to which Gallagher holds fast, a loved one can be truly with us and truly not with us at once, and loss and horror and delight can coexist in a strange harmony. In Gallagher's extraordinary book, the dark basin of terrible loss is not only inhabited, it is rich in hues and textures and possibilities. Using images culled as much from her travels around the world with Carver as from her years spent both with and without him in the Pacific Northwest, with this volume Gallagher has given a rare gift to those of us with loss in our backgrounds. She has journeyed as a shaman does, to map that enduring human trek from overwhelming pathos to multidimensional, even joyful, insight -- with unfailing courage and honesty. One day Gallagher will be seen for the unparalleled talent she is. For now, we who read and do the work to understand her words can be among a privaleged group of fierce and well-rewarded fans.

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Tell It All
Raymond Carver , and Tess Gallagher
Manufacturer: LeConte
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 8888361561

Product Description

Tell It All brings together an unexpected selection of Raymond Carver's unpublished writings. Poems that read like short stories and two one-act plays written with Tess Gallagher are included. Tell It All also features Raymond Carver recollected by other writers, translators and friends from around the globe. Also included is a rich album of rare previously unpublished photographs of Raymond Carver.

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Distant Rain
Tess Gallagher , and Jakucho Setouchi
Manufacturer: Eastern Washington University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Dear Ghosts,: Poems

ASIN: 1597660159

Book Description

The eloquent American poet Tess Gallagher discusses the loss of her husband Raymond Carver and the life of a writer with the prolific Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi. Their heartfelt and uplifting conversation took place at "Jakuan," Jakucho Setouchi's temple in Sagano, Japan. This stunning masterpiece of book design and construction is a work of art that reproduces the wood block and stencil prints of Keiko Hara with the exquisite lettering of typographer Maki Yamashita and the craftsmanship of master bookbinder Atsuo Ikuta.

Poetry East - Origins: Poets on the Composition Process (#43 Fall 1996) (43)

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Poetry East - Origins: Poets on the Composition Process (#43 Fall 1996) (43)
Mary Oliver , Tess Gallagher , Pattiann Rogers , Thomas Lynch , Alan Shapiro , Susan Hahn , Reginald Gibbons , and Robert Bly
Manufacturer: Depaul University
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Product Description

Poets included: Marvin Bell, Reginald Gibbons, Robert Bly, Tony Hoagland, Marianne Boruch, Gail Mazur, Kevin Stein, Jeffrey Skinner, Dorianne Lux, Kim Addonizio, and many more.

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