Tess Gallagher Books

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..

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.

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 . . .

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.

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

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.

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.

This collection of short stories is one of the best i have ever read. Mostly set in the northwest Gallagher captures the ideals and characteristics of most northwest residents. Her stories reflect the mindset of this part of the country. She writes about logging, wildlife, and just general everyday life. She is the best.

Tess Gallagher is a blessing. Readers who have experienced a rich essential quality of living will find the resonate voice of an ageless girl underneath powerfully assembled words. This collection was handed to me by a stranger in a coffee shop in Tacoma, Washington, who said only, "here, have a book of poetry." On a quick reading it seemed like superficial, self indulgent, girlish poetry. But this is not the I, me, you, we, weep at me stuff that fills chap books and keeps vanity presses in business. In this case it only serves to, very cleverly and even handedly, disguise, or vale, the soul of writer. Later the work began to unfold its complexity and came to life right out of the page. The balanced, well tempered blending of the metaphorical and the concrete and a fairly consistant cadence, the ability to play with syntax and meaning, twisting words and sentences into unpredictable and surprising contortions only enhance the necessary meaning of the work and give it life in the minds eye where all good poetry is born.

Tess is soft, sweater soft, but don't let that fool you. She is solid, like a rock. A remarkable woman.

Gallagher's The Lover of Horses is an honest, yet graceful portrait of what makes us who we are. The title story shows the connection between human beings in a very powerful way. In my opinion this is the most well-written story in the text, demonstrative of Gallagher's immense talent in writing stories that are powerful because of their spareness. "Recourse" demonstrates the importance of living day-to-day. "The Woman Who Saved Jesse James" is a story about finding all the "selves" that we are and becoming the "self" we want to be. Each of these stories illustrates the process of interior evaluation we go through as humans. They ask "Which part of us is the essential self?" Gallagher opens up the power of choice and how this affects who we become. Each story connects with our "humanness", as we see that grace comes to the humans in Gallagher's stories, even in the most unexpected ways. Julia M. Hawley

This is a marvelous collection of contemporary love poetry. In tone and style it is very reminiscent of Pablo Neruda's 21 Love Poems. The poems not only treat romantic love in its myriad varieties but also capture the female passion and perspecitve in love. I have long adored the book. Indeed, it was the first collection of poems that brought poetry to life for me. In particular, "Your Hands which I love to Kiss" is my favorite poem as it depicts the strange subtleties of love. If you are at all a chronic romantic, I highly recommend this work.

... She's obviously one of the best, undiscovered writers in the world!! She first came to my attention through my fiance, who'd torn a poem from a 1997 edition of the "New Yorker" for keeping. After the events of September 11th, she was going through a pile of papers and came across that same poem. To her [and subsequently, myself] the poem resonated deeply with what we were going through. The name of that poem is "In the City of What Once Was" and it appears in this brilliant collection. Her work is alternately beautiful and mournful and it speaks eloquently of her experiences in a war-ravaged land [Ms. Ursa's work has been translated from her native Romanian]. She is at once lyrical, sad and evocative. I urge anyone interested in great poetry to BUY THIS BOOK. I'd also recommend that the major American publishers take a good look at her work!!!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ***

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.

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

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."

Call If You Need Me is a collection of writings by Raymond Carver that wouldn't fit into any of his many short story collections. This anthology has five previously unpublished stories as well as a smattering of essays, notes and book reviews. I enjoyed the stories, of the other writing there were hits and misses - the introductions and the book reviews for example were there merely for the sake completeness and don't really serve much of a purpose. Recommended for the short stories.

I just re-read "Kindling" for the umpteenth time, and once again I had to take a deep breath of awe afterwards. I think it's my favorite Carver story. "What Would Like to See?" is good also. They're all good. Even his early work sings with that grand Carver simplicity. But "Kindling" is outstanding. If you buy this book solely for that you're getting much more than your money's worth.

I guess it was bound to happen one day--Carver died when I was in college, when I was still a young writer who was finding inspiration from his work. I didn't really mean to, but I most likely built a kind of Carver mythology in my head and made the mistake of taking my reverence for his writing as a reason to also revere the man as a wise soul. Perhaps it was also knowing the story of the Lish-Carver split, of a writer who broke free from the confines of an editor who had helped bring him to notoriety so that he could write according to his own vision and not the vision of another, that also made Carver a kind of iconic figure in my developing artistic sensibility.

Over time, of course, I found the less lustrous moments of Carver's work and found myself more in respect than awe. In rereading his stories, I found the gears behind the magic, saw his process of moving narrative and even allowed myself to note what stories of his I didn't like. I consider this a closer affection for Carver's work than when I was in awe of it, for it allowed me to touch the humanity of Carver's art, which I find a more solid basis for connection than reverence and idolatry. Note that I have made no mention of Carver's poetry--this is because I simply could never find myself appreciating much of it, and this is another aspect of my respect for Carver. In order to truly embrace something and hold it dear, we also need to know what's wrong with it.

So I was of course intrigued to read Carver stories that had never come to light before, and of late I have been finding myself more and more interested in the thinking processes of artists, so I wanted to read the nonfiction too, not only for insight on his own writing but in the writing of others.

The five uncollected stories here are all quite wonderful and confirm the direction of Carver's work--the compassionate insight into characters struggling to make themselves better, though that improvement is not always in the direction they initially foresee. We of course see a lot of couples in flux, even on the verge of breaking up as their best option. Among these, I think the strongest of them is the title story, for it combines the essence of what has always Carver's work so powerful--a touch of magic rooted squarely in the mundane. I would rather not give away the magical moment here, but Carver does it with skillful handling so that it is a moment as natural as any other, and his handling of characters is as thorough and as kind as ever.

The five essays included here are also quite wonderful. "On Writing" and his essay on John Gardner are excellent treatises on the art of writing, done of course in a rather unobtrusive style that focuses on what Carver himself did rather than demand certain efforts from others. My wife was also quite taken with "Fires," and how Carver talks about writing (or not writing) while having children. The early stories, which are next included, are interesting but not thoroughly engaging (though, in "The Hair," it is quite funny to see Carver parodying Hemingway), but as I got through these, and of course into Carver's book reviews and commentaries, I started to get a sense of a stilted man, who had decided, through circumstance or philosophy, that writing worked best under certain circumstances. This became quite clear in his comments on Donald Barthelme and his introduction to American Short Story Masterpieces.

Perhaps Carver was still reeling at the time of these with his split from Gordon Lish, for Carver seems to insist in these works on a style of writing that is very much different from the school of writing that was (and probably is) promoted heavily by Gordon Lish, something that Carver was directed towards (willingly or unwillingly) by Lish when it came to putting together his early collections. In his review of Barthelme's Great Days, he talks about his admiration of the Donald's work, which is good to see, but he also goes on a tirade against those who imitate Barthelme's work in writing programs (a criticism that, ironically, could now be applied to many students in college writing programs who now flatly imitate Carver). In the introduction to American Short Story Masterpieces, Carver insists even more directly on fiction that exhibits the lives of "grown-up men and women engaged in the ordinary but sometimes remarkable business of living and, like ourselves, in full awareness of their mortality."

This, of course, is a good summary of Carver's aesthetic, but he seems to insist in this introduction that it is the best kind of writing, and this seems to undermine the compassionate Carver, one who might accept differences in others, for these differences seem to be okay only if they apply exclusively to this aesthetic.

Carver's shortcomings become best known through his introduction to Best American Short Stories, 1986, something I had read long ago soon after the volume had come out but hadn't revisited until reading this collection. Carver clearly made some good choices (Charles Baxter, Amy Hempel), but there is a certain amount of nepotism among his choices--Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Tess Gallagher. That the first two were close friends, the last a significant other, tainted those choices for me (also the included fact that some of the selections were hand-picked by Carver and not provided by series editor Shannon Ravenel) now that I knew more about Raymond Carver the man than I did in the late 80's when I first picked up that book.

But these kinds of revelations are bound to happen and, let's face it, necessary. But was this the point of this collection? From Tess Gallagher's introduction, I think not. I am no longer in awe of Carver, and haven't been for a long time, and I still respect his work quite highly, and frankly it is good to see some chinks in the armor and evidence of his own weaknesses, but I kind of doubt that the collection was meant to leave me feeling this way.

Try to rate a Carver short stories collection is like trying to rate your father actions. You just can't judge him, you only can stare at him. You can even try to understand him, but you don't really have to. There is something beautiful and small hidden in every adjective, every description, every end of a story. Raymond Carver's love for human actions is everywhere in his writing. He puts big attention in little details, uncovering the small moments in every relationationship. You and your wife. Your wife and her friends. Tons of couples having dinner with other couples. Every little thing is a whole world for Carver.

This book comes with four new stories recently discovered, a couple of great essays (the great "My father's life"), early stories, introductions, books reviews and a small uncomppleted fragment of a novel. Definitively, it's Carver for friends. If you are not familiar with his books, you should start with his most famous books, as "What we talk abgout when we talk about love", or his first collection of stories, "Will you please be quiet, please?". Any other case, you are welcome to enter this house.

I am excited that there are "new" stories by Raymond Carver. "Call If You Need Me" and "Kindling" are among his best. The rest of the book is disappointing to me: I didn't realize that this would just be the new stories tacked on to NO HEROICS, PLEASE. Essentially, serious readers of Carver's work are being asked to buy the same book twice. "Call If You Need Me" can be found in this year's O. Henry anthology, and "Kindling" can be found in the current edition of Best American Short Stories. The other new stories, I guess, can be found in past issues of Esquire magazine. If the new stories were instead collected in some other way - say, in a slim volume alone, or with some unpublished work by other worthy writers, then I wouldn't be as disappointed. I was expecting a new book altogether -- not just new pages. Still, these stories need to be read. NO HEROICS, PLEASE is a book worth owning, too. If you don't already own it, then I recommend this title. Otherwise, find the new stories elsewhere.