POET

Tess Gallagher (1943 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Tess Gallagher is ranked among America's finest contemporary poets. Her first collection, Stepping Outside, is compared by Prairie Schooner's Robert Ross to "the accomplished stripper, who has vanished from the stage by the time the yokels realized that it is her sequined G-string that is spinning toward them through the smoky air." Ross adds, "This is a beautiful and also a refreshing book."

Instructions to the Double is probably Gallagher's best-known work. Many of these poems focus on the conflicting values of the family, and on departure and return. But Gallagher's main interest seems to be with comparisons of the self. As Valerie Trueblood notes in American Poetry Review, "The poems are full of doubles: shadows, reflections in eyes and water and mirrors, resemblances..., photographs, a body's impression burnt onto bedsprings in a fire." Trueblood contends, however, that "the buried excitement of family life produces the strongest poems in the book."

According to De Villo Sloan in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Instructions to the Double represents "Gallagher's most influential collection." The poems of this volume fall into two distinct categories—those representing the confessional mode and those tending toward the abstract or surreal. In addition to the notable poems "Breasts" and "Black Money," as Sloan notes, "The book's title poem, 'Instructions to the Double,' chronicles the emergence of Gallagher's identity as a poet and liberation from the constraints of the past. This birth is an ordeal, and she employs the techniques of postmodernism, surrealism, and the concept of Carl G. Jung's shadow figure to express the struggle."

Gallagher continued to impress readers with her next collection, Under Stars. Fellow poet Hayden Carruth is especially pleased with the "feminine" quality of the poems. He declares that "Gallagher's poems, beyond their delicacy of language, have a delicacy of perception that I... associate with women: the capacity to see oneself objectively as another person doing the things one really does, but without the hard philosophical intrusions most men resort to; instead with clear affection and natural concern." Carruth concludes, "Delicacy and light and the feminine strength of a clear view—these are the qualities that give me much pleasure in Gallagher's work." Also complimentary of Under Stars, Peter Davison notes in Atlantic that "Gallagher has undertaken one of the most daunting of poetic adventures: utilizing all the resources of language to explore the nuances of feeling, the nature of the passage of time, and most intricately, the nature of language itself." Critic Stanley Kunitz tells a Greywolf Press editor that Gallagher "is outstanding among her contemporaries in the naturalness of her inflection, the fine excess of her spirit, and the energy of her dramatic imagination."

Commenting on Willingly, Gallagher's third collection of poetry, Jim Elledge writes in Poetry, "On the surface, Tess Gallagher's poems seem little more than observations on ordinary events which she has witnessed or, more often, in which she has participated...However, an intense emotional conflict lies submerged beneath the calm images and metaphors...which raises otherwise mundane subjects to art of a high caliber." Praising the volume in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Sloan writes, "Willingly is expansive in scope and breath. A book in which her vision exceeds all her previous writing, it is concerned with establishing a compassionate, humane, and meaningful way of living in a world where traditional moral systems, based on religion, have been abandoned." While noting Gallagher's tendency toward subjectivity and private discourse in Willingly, Peter Stitt writes in Georgia Review, "Gallagher shows herself to be a sophisticated stylist, able to use rhetorical devices as a poem demands."

New York Times Book Review contributor William Logan cites the recurring significance of the poet's father in her work, who, according to Logan, "is the most affecting and afflicted character." According to Vickie Karp in Parnassus, "To talk about her father is to talk about the land.... His life as a logger, longshoreman, farmer, fisherman anneal his every action to the land. So symbolized, he is the vehicle to and from her innermost world. It is an American landscape where pride, sometimes a hindrance to love, is essential to romance." As Logan observes, "The compulsive scenario of her poetry, as might be expected by a writer so attentive to surroundings, requires moments of physical connection, even with strangers," adding "Miss Gallagher makes public what is private loss."

With Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, which appeared in 1987, "Tess Gallagher... establishes herself as a stunning and original contemporary voice," according to Rhoda Carrol in Small Press. The volume includes selections from her previous major collections Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, and Willingly, as well as more than twenty new compositions that take the form of travelogues, family memoirs, and lyrical reflection on the death of loved ones. As Sloan observes, "If there is any unifying factor in this eclectic mix of new poems in Amplitude, it is their consistent emphasis on morality. Many of them can best be described as didactic." Commenting on Gallagher's new poems, Marianne Boruch writes in American Poetry Review, "Less kneejerk, more gratefully certain, one could call this new edge a slippage into a world, a vision of the world wrought equally by mystery and purpose...Gallagher is intent on recovery, personal, at times, national, in a style more and more narrative."

In 1986 Gallagher produced The Lover of Horses and Other Stories, a volume of short stories that reflects her increasing movement toward narrative forms as anticipated in Willingly and Amplitude. Despite the deceptively uneventful small town settings of the stories, as Elizabeth Alexander notes in Washington Post Book World, "the day-to-day lives in The Lover of Horses are mined with small, extraordinary moments of epiphany and unsettling insight." In "Recourse," for example, "one of Ms. Gallagher's finest stories" according to New York Times Book Review contributor Bette Pesetsky, two men separately return to their hometown and become reacquainted as neighbors. "Childhood sweethearts, spoiled marriages, betrayals—here, as elsewhere in this collection," writes Pesetsky, "the narrative directness and meticulous presentation of the banal details of life create a durable world." Michiko Kakutani praises the volume in the New York Times, noting that "Ms. Gallagher is a strict, highly disciplined writer, and the tensile quality of her prose often reinforces the sense of danger—emotional, spiritual and physical—that lingers over these stories. Reading them, one begins to fear that something will happen...or even worse, that nothing will occur, leaving the characters to stew, alone, in their disconsolation." Pesetsky concludes that Gallagher is "an excellent writer of prose who savors the elegance of simplicity and whose stories resonate and linger."

Gallagher followed with Moon Crossing Bridge, a series of sixty poems that centers on the theme of loss and grieving prompted by the death of her husband, Raymond Carver, in 1988. According to Marilyn Kallet in American Book Review, "Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge is a rare document of loss, faith, and returns—return to the site of loving and to the gradual last breath, return to life's immediate summonings." Though noting Gallagher's tendency toward excessive emotion, Mark Jarman writes in the Hudson Review, "Gallagher has always been best in the short, spare, basically narrative lyric, and that is how she is best in this book of grief."

Yet, despite the obvious difficulty of undertaking such painful personal material, Margaret Holley notes in Michigan Quarterly Review, "It was both risky and necessary for Tess Gallagher to write straight out of grief at the loss of her beloved husband...The elegiac danger of self-indulgence is routed here by a poetic spirit that is genuine, generous, good-humored, open, and uncommonly sure and mysterious in its touch." Judith Kitchen writes in the Georgia Review, "At its heart, Moon Crossing Bridge is filled with wonder—the kind of wonder the title poem alludes to as it rejects aesthetics or faith in favor of something ineffable. Each dream, each speculation, springs from the desire of the living to know what only the dead can know. With refreshing honesty, Gallagher walks right up to the walls she cannot scale and comes close enough to feel their texture...Whatever such material may ultimately mean to her private life, it has left her a more powerful, confident, and convincing poet."

The 1995 publication of My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems brings together examples of Gallagher's best poetry from 1976 to 1992, including Moon Crossing Bridge in its entirety and more than twenty new compositions. Citing Gallagher's increasing use of metaphor to capture the inexpressible in paradox, Sandra Cookson writes in World Literature Today, "These poems cross and recross the boundaries between the flesh and the spirit, extending with varying degrees of success the reach of metaphor." As Sloan concludes in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Tess Gallagher's poetry is primarily concerned with the self; but in the poetic tradition of Walt Whitman, she discovers a transcendent self whose paradoxical salvation is through love of others. In her work, readers see the ever-growing dynamics of human experience."

Gallagher once told Contemporary Authors: "I sing traditional Irish dirge and have traveled and lived in Northern Ireland and also near Sligo in the Republic for months at a time since 1968. I feel very close to the poets in Northern Ireland, who have become my friends. My interest in filmmaking has now led me to the writing of scripts with Raymond Carver, the short-story writer I live and work with.

"My main obsession in the poems of late has been with how memory works or doesn't work in the creating of 'what matters' in our lives. The nature of Time is of continual interest. I have been reading a great deal on this subject in the hopes of bringing more of such thought to my poems. J. T. Fraser and Henri Bergson have been recent valuable sources."

CAREER

St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, instructor in English, 1974-75; Kirkland College, Clinton, NY, assistant professor of creative writing, 1975-77; University of Montana, Missoula, visiting lecturer of creative writing, 1977-78; University of Arizona, Tucson, assistant professor of creative writing, 1979-80; Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, associate professor of English and coordinator of creative writing program, 1980-90; poet. Instructor at Willamette University, 1981.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

Stepping Outside, Penumbra Press, 1974.
Instructions to the Double, Graywolf Press, 1976.
Under Stars, Graywolf Press, 1978.
Portable Kisses, Sea Pen, 1978, expanded edition, Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1994.
On Your Own, Graywolf Press, 1978.
Willingly, Graywolf Press, 1984.
Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1987.
Moon Crossing Bridge, Graywolf Press, 1992.
Owl-Spirit Dwelling, Trask House Books, 1994.
My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 1995.

OTHER

Some with Wings, Some with Manes (recording), Watershed, 1982.
Dostoevsky: A Screenplay (with Raymond Carver), Capra Press, 1985.
The Lover of Horses and Other Stories, Harper, 1986.
A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 1986.
Across the Bridge: Stories, Carroll & Graf (New York), 1994.
At the Owl Woman Saloon, Scribner, 1997.
Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, University of Michigan Press, 2000.
(Author of foreword) Raymond Carver, Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, edited by William L. Stull, Vintage Contemporaries, 2001.

Author of television play "The Wheel," 1970, and screenplay "The Night Belongs to the Police," 1982. Work anthologized in Influences, Harper, 1982. Columnist for American Poetry Review. Contributor of poems, short stories, and essays to periodicals, including Parnassus, Ironwood, New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Missouri Review, and North American Review