Midnight Lantern

Book excerpt: Tess Gallagher is one of America's leading poets. In Midnight Lantern she collects her indispensable work from forty years of writing poetry, along with an ample new section written in the west of Ireland. Included in this generous book are Gallagher's signature nocturnes - for the changing Pacific Northwest, for her tough childhood, and for her late husband, Raymond Carver, and others. Her challenging new work confronts a tumultuous century's worth of art, warfare, and illness, while certifying the stubborn resilience of poetry and love. Astonishing, insightful, mischievous, an inimitable 'seeing-into experience', Midnight Lantern is the essential book by a poet in the prime of her power. 'Gallagher's poems resound with exquisite beauty and remind me once more how it is not subject but its rendering that redeems and uplifts' - Boston Globe 'Tess Gallagher's is perhaps the most deeply moving and spiritual and intensely intelligent poetry being written in America today' - William Heyen '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