Tess Gallagher is one of America’s leading poets. In Dear Ghosts she communes with ghosts of the past – including her late husband, Raymond Carver, and her parents, as well as victims of holocaust and past and present wars – at the same time as she confronts her own illness and mortality, and celebrates love and friendship.
‘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…Substantial yet lambent, earthy and spiritual, these are her best works in an already incandescent oeuvre… So compelling are Gallagher’s graceful poems, they leave the reader feeling “rearranged from the cells out”.’ – Donna Seaman, Booklist
‘Gallagher’s big, emotion-rich volume is her first in 14 years… Her own fight against cancer provides another subtext for many poems and the explicit subject for a few. She celebrates her survival while finding ‘Time / to admit the limitations of death’. The many who cherished her earlier verse will find the new work profound’ – Publishers Weekly
‘It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their mesmerising rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images’ – Joyce Carol Oates
‘She is outstanding among her contemporaries in the naturalness of her inflection, the fine excess of her spirit, and the energy of her dramatic imagination’ – Stanley Kunitz
Tess Gallagher reads seven poems
Tess Gallagher reads seven poems selected from her Bloodaxe retrospective Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems : ‘For Yvonne’, ‘Black Silk’, ‘The Hug’, ‘Yes’, ‘Wake’, ‘Choices’ and ‘I Stop Writing the Poem’. Neil Astley filmed her reading and discussing a selection of her poems at her Irish home in Ballindoon by Lough Arrow, Co. Sligo, in April 2012. This film is one of 60 videos included in the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed and edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017).
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