Moon Crossing Bridge
- Book Review,
by Tess Gallagher
Amazon.com
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.
Book Description
Tess Gallagher's stunning new poems of remembrance, mourning, and recovery following the death of her husband, Raymond Carver.
From the Back Cover
Tess Gallagher's stunning new poems of remembrance, mourning, and recovery following the death of her husband, Raymond Carver.
"These poems are a gift of a poet's heart and soul to her readers--songs of love and loss, of pain and recovery. . . . A brave, unsparing, searchingly considered lesson for and statement to those of us lucky enough to meet the author through this book."--Robert Coles
About the Author
Tess Gallagher's previous publications include Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, A Concert of Tenses (essays on poetry), and The Lover of Horses and Other Stories. Portable Kisses (poetry) is forthcoming from Capra Press in April. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she has recently completed the introductino to No Heroics, Please, the first of two volumes of The Uncollected Works of Raymond Carver, edited by William Stull.
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