Is, is not : poems

Is, is not Poems

Tess Gallagher

Book - 2019

Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and hovers daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Tess Gallagher's poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop. Guided by humor, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests--the Northwest of America, the Northwest of Ireland, and a West even further to the edge, beyond the physical. These landscapes are charged with invisible energies and inhabited by the people, liv...ing and dead, who shape Gallagher's poems and life. Restorative in every sense, Is, Is Not is the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write--a book of the spirit made manifest by the poet's unrelenting gaze and her intimate engagement with the mysteries that keep us reaching. --Publisher.

Saved in:
Place a Hold Save to List Email this

2nd Floor Show me where

811.54/Gallagher
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 811.54/Gallagher Checked In
Subjects
American poetry > 21st century.
Poetry.
Genres
Poetry
Published
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Tess Gallagher (author)
Physical Description
147 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781555978419
  • Recognition
  • I.
  • In the Company of Flowers
  • Almost Lost Moment
  • Ambition
  • Your Dog Playing with a Coyote
  • Ability to Hold Territory
  • Blind Dog/Seeing Girl
  • Doe Browsing Salal Berries
  • II.
  • Little Inside Out Dream
  • Dream Cancel
  • Stolen Dress
  • Glass Impresses
  • Hummingbird-Mind
  • One Deer at Dusk
  • III.
  • Correction
  • Sully
  • Retroactive Father
  • Earth
  • The Seemingly Domesticated
  • Reaching
  • Right-Minded Person
  • In the Too-Bright Café
  • IV.
  • Let's Store These Hours
  • Season of Burnt-Out Candelabras
  • The Branches of the Maple
  • Yet to Be Born Weather
  • I Want to Be Loved Like Somebody's Beloved Dog in America
  • While I Was Away
  • V.
  • Without
  • Deer Path Enigma
  • The Favorite Cup
  • What Does It Say
  • VI.
  • Bus to Belfast
  • Is, Is Not
  • As the Diamond
  • During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading
  • Curfew
  • Eddies Steps
  • Four-Footed
  • The Gold Dust of the Linden Trees
  • Blue Eyelid Lifting
  • VII.
  • Button, Button
  • Breath
  • To an Irishman Painting in the Rain
  • Encounter
  • Planet Greece
  • Cloud-Path
  • VIII.
  • Oliver
  • A "Sit" with Eileen
  • Remembering Each Other While Together
  • Opening
  • Word of Mouth
  • Daylong Visitor
  • Caress
  • March Moon
  • Three Stars
  • Afterword: Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The new book from Gallagher (Midnight Lantern) uses imagery to ask compelling philosophical questions: Does reality exist within the mind or outside of it? What is the moral obligation of beauty, if any? Does time proceed in a linear fashion? While impressively wide-ranging in its intellectual inquiry, the book is unified by several motifs culled from the natural world, with "rhododendrons so red," "wild salmon," and a seemingly endless expanse of "slack water." Gallagher's craft excels as she balances image and abstraction, grounding the wild flights of the speaker's philosophical imagination. She writes, "Thinking/ as I dug into earth of my mother/ who, when my youngest brother/ died, was taken in/ by beauty, not as consolation/ but because she found him/ there as she made the garden." Gallagher uses the proverbial garden as a vehicle for exploring questions of ethics, compassion, and inner experience. Through this skillful curation, she prompts us to ask ourselves if it is indeed a transgression to be "taken in beauty" in the face of death. While at certain moments the work veers too deeply towards abstraction (she describes a moment "coming back in an incidental way,/ claiming to be the most beautiful/ moment of my life"), the book's subtle lyricism makes even the occasional dreaminess beautiful. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In award-winning poet and short story writer Gallagher's new collection of verse (after Midnight Lantern), carefully constructed reveries are a bridge between then and now, consciousness and belief, and, more prosaically, Ireland and America, the author's two homelands. And so fairies come and go, the dead hover, and hearth fires play tricks with daylight. This is the joy of poetry, for both writer and reader: each poem is handmade on the page, with the slow brickwork of stanza by stanza, and it can aim high: "As the diamond is bound by light, so are we/ breath-bound into our/ shining. But for that, the stone/ of us would gray us past silence/ into some deeper, earned/ neglect." Yet even as a diamond flashes on the finger, imperial and yet somehow false, feeling stolen form "the mother/ of the beloved," one might also wish for something messier, earthier, more urgent. The elevated language-"when the health headlines in the candelabra of the moment"-can sometimes dull rather than illuminate the underlying feeling. VERDICT Gallagher has written 11 volumes of poetry, and this newest offering is not a small collection of work. Readers of quiet, thoughtful poetry will find much to savor.-Iris S. Rosenberg, New York © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Similar Items