Dear Ghosts

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 is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and playwright. She has published many books, including five poetry titles in Britain with Bloodaxe, most recently Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems (2012), and her later collection, Is Is Not (2019). She has published two collections of stories, The Lover of Horses (1986) and At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997), and two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986) and Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000). She co-authored two screenplays with Raymond Carver, and later contributed to the making of the Robert Altman film Short Cuts, based on Carver's work. She spends parts of each year in the West of Ireland, and her collection of oral stories from Ireland, Barnacle Soup, co-authored with Irish painter and storyteller Josie Gray, was published by Blackstaff Press in 2007.