Tess Gallagher – författare

Tess Gallagher’s new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty. Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and journeys toward discovering the full capacity of language. Gallagher’s poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop and hover daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Guided by humour, 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 north-west 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, living 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.

‘Ideally, a reader should finish this book, then find someone to kiss.’ – Tess Gallagher‘This is the best book of love poems since Neruda’s.’ – Bill Knott‘There are as many nuances and inflections for kisses as there are lips to kiss,’ says American poet Tess Gallagher. And so with these playful, serious and sassy poems about kisses, a whole book devoted to the kiss. Portable Kisses is a book which kept growing. The earliest poems were published in a hand-printed limited edition called Portable Kisses in 1978. But the poems wouldn’t stop, like the best of kisses, and Tess Gallagher published a new Portable Kisses in 1992, followed two years later by Portable Kisses Expanded. This first UK edition of the most travelled kisses in poetry since Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair includes all the kisses Tess Gallagher has put down on paper.