Product Description

Tess Gallagher, one of America's most accomplished poets, presents her sixth book, a descent into the world of the dead, a remembrance of her recently deceased beloved, whose presence and absence are recalled in sombre lyrical rhythms and with a extraordinary range of expressions of love and sadness.

Devoid of self-pity or illusion, yet full of dream and vision and wisdom, these beautifully intense and powerful poems bestow the gift of words to the widow's silence, to the silence of all who are muted by grief and loss. With this unusual volume, arranged in six carefully paced movements to suggest the journey from death to recovery, Gallagher charges language with its utmost responsibilities: here poetry aspires deeply and urgently beyond its cultural marginality to embrace the paradox of sharing unshareable pain and to assume again an Orphic voice and a communal necessity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1669867 in Books
• Published on: 1992-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Amazon.com Review
Tess Gallagher's poems in this collection chart the painful road of mourning, memory, and change following the death of her beloved husband, fiction writer Raymond Carver. From feelings of sharing death to memories of valentines they gave each other, and then in an upward arch through Zen imagery of cherry blossoms and curved bridges, Gallagher's poems come to no easy rest on the banks of a new life and new loves. But for all those who have experienced tragedy, the poems relate a common assurance that a crossing into survival can be reached.

From Publishers Weekly
Gallagher's ( Amplitude ) new collection is dedicated to her husband, Raymond Carver, who died of cancer in 1988. One cannot help being moved by the emotion that grounds the work, even if the poems sometimes affect us more because of what lies behind them than because of what shows through. Some focus on ordinary objects now invested both with the warmth of remembrance and the agony of grief ("Some gifts are sent / only to haunt"), while others recall moments of leave-taking, such as Carver planting a tree, knowing " 'Even this thing is going to outlive /me.' " The poem "Wake" ("We were dead / a little while together then, serene / and afloat on the strange broad canopy / of the abandoned world") is one of the most visceral. However, slackness is evident in "Sad Moments" ("we are fit for modulation and /whim, for cloves and lace, or / that dim creaturely train rushing past us") and bathos in "He Would Have" ("Any unexpected bounty adds him like seasoning / to the day"). Still, Gallagher's best poems powerfully evoke the ambiguous life of the survivor, who can say, "My love's early death has scraped away my future," yet go on charting a life that has become a "chaotic laboratory of broken approaches." Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The poems in this collection, Gallagher's fifth, arise from the grief she experienced after the death of her husband, poet and short story writer Raymond Carver, when "morning and the night uncoupled." These poems struggle to re-create the mourner's passage through grief, a passage accomplished by "pulling bright, tenacious filaments out of the absent body of the love itself." Some of this poetry is difficult: even when her verse begins from or turns on a homely object or occasion, Gallagher stretches language--both image and structure--as if in her effort to wrest understanding from great loss, even ordinary things lead her to confront the unfathomable mysteries of love and death, endurance and despair, lover and beloved. Despite the difficulty, this is a luminous and important book that well repays careful attention. Recommended.
- Margaret K. Powell, Yale Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

An extraordinarily complex and daring book of elegies
Gallagher, whose decade-long relationship with the great short story writer Raymond Carver ended with Carver's early death to cancer in 1987, has written a masterpiece. Largely underrecognized, Moon Crossing Bridge has yet to receive its full due as one of the most deeply thoughtful and passionate poetic works on the subject of loss to emerge in recent memory. Gallagher has allowed the language that rose from her grief to carry her into the mystery that constitutes the borderland between the dead and those left behind. Her words sway like the tough threads of a hammock strung between the two worlds, holding us aloft as we allow ourselves to risk belief in paradoxical truths: that in the poetic universe to which Gallagher holds fast, a loved one can be truly with us and truly not with us at once, and loss and horror and delight can coexist in a strange harmony. In Gallagher's extraordinary book, the dark basin of terrible loss is not only inhabited, it is rich in hues and textures and possibilities. Using images culled as much from her travels around the world with Carver as from her years spent both with and without him in the Pacific Northwest, with this volume Gallagher has given a rare gift to those of us with loss in our backgrounds. She has journeyed as a shaman does, to map that enduring human trek from overwhelming pathos to multidimensional, even joyful, insight -- with unfailing courage and honesty. One day Gallagher will be seen for the unparalleled talent she is. For now, we who read and do the work to understand her words can be among a privaleged group of fierce and well-rewarded fans.

Poems certainly worthy of highest praise...
The passion and imagery contained in this book of highly personal poems astounds! I hope Ms. Gallagher's book will gain the recognition it deserves. To allow us to come so close to the poet seems to be a rarity in much of today's poetry. This incredible sharing will grab you and not let go. Our thanks to Ms. Gallagher . . .

simply beautiful
WOW!!!!! what imagery, heart and beauty..Tess Gallagher's tribute
book to her deceased husband Raymond Carver,is the words of a grieving angel.."Deaf Poem" is my favorite.moon over bridge will
go down in history as one of the great book of poems dealing with
love,lost and renewal again..and i couldnt help thinking after reading it,how truly blessed Mr Carver was to have a love like
Tess in his life..and every man would be blessed to have a lady
love them just a tenth as much as she did..and does..pick up
this book!!!!!you wont regret it..