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Ireland is known throughout the world for its rich and vibrant storytelling. Josie Gray is a proud inheritor of this tradition, a yarn-spinner whose evocative and authentic stories are steeped in the rural west of Ireland community to which he belongs. Beautifully crafted, subtly paced, and richly textured, Gray's stories vividly and affectionately bring to life a disparate cast of characters and recreate the fabric of their everyday lives. Disputes, laughter, courting, death, drink and general all-round skulduggery are the order of the day as Gray skilfully weaves together myth and fact, truth and near-truth. Captivated by these tales, acclaimed poet Tess Gallagher worked with Gray to give his oral stories written form. The result is a stunning collection that preserves the intimacy, melody and rhythm of Gray's voice. ... Read more

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Funny, wise and fascinating
This is a collection of very short stories (sometimes only a few hundred words long) recounted by an old guy from County Sligo and massaged into written form. Some of them are mysterious, some of them very funny, some are wise and humane, and others simply offer little insights into a way of life rapidly vanishing. The whole thing will take you about 90 minutes to read, and I can't think of a better way to pass a train journey than this little gem. ... Read more

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Half genius. Half... not.
Tess Gallagher, Dear Ghosts, (Graywolf, 2006)

Tess Gallagher, when she's writing intensely personal, imagist poems, is perhaps one of America's better poets currently working. And about half of Dear Ghosts, is comprised of exactly this sort of thing. Unfortunately, the reader must also contend with the other half of the book, which treads, and sometimes falls flat on its face over, the line of message poetry, over which very few poets can walk and still produce anything even remotely related to poetry. Worth reading, but beware a few pitfalls here and there. ***

The Best of American Poetry
You can do nothing better for yourself than to read Dear Ghosts,.Tess Gallagher has always been among the best of American poets.Her most recent work continues to add jewels to the crown of great poetry.As the poems engage us, we become aware why poetry is so necessary to the human spirit.Dear Ghosts, opens us to emotion.Within its enacted drama, we walk the difficult but necessary terrain of reaching out to others, thereby realizing ourselves.Finally, Gallagher explores the frontier of language itself, continually reminding us that in words we discover self.The best books of poetry, no matter how deeply we linger and meditate, no matter how we value them for their ability to yield in reading after reading, are also page-turners, and this is a book, once begun, you won't want to put down.And one you'll pick up again, year after year.--Alice Derry, Peninsula College

She just keeps on getting better
A book of poems by Tess Gallagher is an event. They're beautifully presented and beautifully written. And they are powerful. The poet doesn't seem satisfied to write about pretty things; she wants her poems to matter. And they do. Poems about murderers and refugees and sad, tragic lives; poems about war and childhood and marriages and joy; and poems about the dead (those "dear ghosts"): a sparrow, her father, her mother, her husband. This is a book to savor. Read it slowly, then read it again. And again. It's so easy to miss the nuances, the subleties. Tess Gallagher writes of enormous themes, and she does so in small and striking language - intimately. You will devour this book and crave to "take the next bite / and say, I believe it."

Featuring poems in which ghosts of the past are summoned and discoursed with in the present day
Published fourteen years after the author's previous poetry book, Dear Ghosts is the seventh collection and long-awaited return of Tess Gallagher's poetic voice. Featuring poems in which ghosts of the past are summoned and discoursed with in the present day, Dear Ghosts speaks with such spectral figures as the deceased beloved, the long-dead father, and victims of holocaust and war. Gallagher confronts her own aging, illness, and mortality with grace, modesty, and good humor in this insightful and reflective collection. "Knives in the Borrowed House": Don't sharpen them. / Expectation, more dangerous / than any blade.
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The Man from Kinvara
Tess Gallagher's writing seems to have two main influences: a violent family tragedy early in her life, and her marriage to short story master Raymond Carver. Both of these influences act as touchstones in The Man from Kinvara Gallagher's volume of selected stories.

Gallagher has gathered the stories from two earlier volumes, The Lover of Horses and At the Owl Woman Saloon, to make up this book. The selections from The Lover of Horses are vibrant, arresting visions of blue collar life tinged with depression and violence, as in the title story, where an immigrant family loses their breadwinner to a circus, and a young descendant struggles with her inheritance of that wildness.

The stories in the second half are more distant from the action, often told from a bystander's perspective. This may cause an unfortunate disconnect for readers, unless they are familiar with Carver's work. Many of the pieces from At the Owl Woman Saloon are responses to some of Carver's most famous stories, and are a touching homage to a loved husband.

Reviewed by Katie Capello ... Read more

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Tess Gallagher's stunning new poems of remembrance, mourning, and recovery following the death of her husband, Raymond Carver.
Amazon.com Review
Tess Gallagher's poems in this collection chart the painfulroad of mourning, memory, and change following the death of herbeloved husband, fiction writer RaymondCarver.From feelings of sharing death to memories of valentinesthey gave each other, and then in an upward arch through Zen imageryof cherry blossoms and curved bridges, Gallagher's poems come to noeasy rest on the banks of a new life and new loves. But for all thosewho have experienced tragedy, the poems relate a common assurance thata crossing into survival can be reached. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

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 themjust a tenth as much as she did..and does..pick up
this book!!!!!you wont regret it..

Moon Crossing
This is a great book of poems written near the time of her husband's death.I read the review of this book and purchased it for a friend whose husband had died.Now, 5 years later, she still tells me how much she loved this book and how much it meant to her.This is a great book.It is particularly wonderful for someone who has lost their husband.

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 inmuch of today's poetry. This incredible sharing will grab you and not letgo.Our thanks to Ms. Gallagher . . .

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 Bridgehas yet to receive its full due as one of the most deeply thoughtful andpassionate poetic works on the subject of loss to emerge in recent memory.Gallagher has allowed the language that rose from her grief to carry herinto the mystery that constitutes the borderland between the dead and thoseleft behind. Her words sway like the tough threads of a hammock strungbetween the two worlds, holding us aloft as we allow ourselves to riskbelief in paradoxical truths: that in the poetic universe to whichGallagher holds fast, a loved one can be truly with us and truly not withus at once, and loss and horror and delight can coexist in a strangeharmony. In Gallagher's extraordinary book, the dark basin of terrible lossis not only inhabited, it is rich in hues and textures and possibilities.Using images culled as much from her travels around the world with Carveras 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 lossin our backgrounds. She has journeyed as a shaman does, to map thatenduring human trek from overwhelming pathos to multidimensional, evenjoyful, insight -- with unfailing courage and honesty. One day Gallagherwill be seen for the unparalleled talent she is. For now, we who read anddo the work to understand her words can be among a privaleged group offierce and well-rewarded fans. ... Read more

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Powerful, elegant, simple, insightful
Gallagher's The Lover of Horses is an honest, yet graceful portrait of what makes us who we are.The title story shows the connection between human beings in a very powerful way.In my opinion this is the mostwell-written story in the text, demonstrative of Gallagher's immense talentin writing stories that are powerful because of their spareness. "Recourse" demonstrates the importance of living day-to-day. "The Woman Who Saved Jesse James" is a story about finding allthe "selves" that we are and becoming the "self" wewant to be.Each of these stories illustrates the process of interiorevaluation we go through as humans.They ask "Which part of us is theessential self?"Gallagher opens up the power of choice and how thisaffects who we become.Each story connects with our "humanness",as we see that grace comes to the humans in Gallagher's stories, even inthe most unexpected ways. Julia M. Hawley ... Read more

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Raymond Carver finished A New Path To The Waterfall shortly before his death in August 1988. These fifty poems--as hard and clear and emotionally pure as his short stories--chart a human journey: false starts and redemptions, the discovery of happiness, memory, and leave-taking, and the full apprehension of mortality. An avowal of love, this collection is also a haunting record of Carver's approach to death. ... Read more

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Raymond Carver--A New Path to the Waterfall
I love Carver and I was glad to get this volume of his last works.

A wonderful collection
Gravy and Late Fragment are two of the most beautiful and powerful poems I know . . . .

The last poems . . .
This was Raymond Carver's 11th and apparently last book of poems, published after his death by his wife Tess Gallagher, who writes a long, thoughtful introduction describing Carver's last months before dying of cancer at age 50. Unlike his previous collection, "Where Water Comes Together With Other Water," this book has a number of poems that are more dream-like and surreal, the references not always easy to grasp. There are story poems that resemble the characters and situations in his short stories. And there are brief selections from the writings and poems of Anton Chekhov, Czeslaw Milosz, and others, which provide an allusive context of ideas and images for Carver's own poems.

There is the usual melancholy and awareness of death in these poems, made more riveting by the knowledge of the poet's awareness of his own approaching death. Reading his words and apprehending the emotions they convey, you find yourself treasuring deeply your own living moments - all of them, ordinary or extraordinary as they may be.

The poems are variations on related themes, ideas and observations captured and rendered in a wide variety of moods. There is sad bitterness in a poem about his son, "On an Old Photograph Of My Son." There are memories of boyhood in Yakima and a memoir-like fragment in "Some Prose on 'Poetry'," describing a stranger's gift of poetry books to him at an impressionable age. "His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed With Notes" is a playful catalog of random thoughts entertained and then dismissed as "horsing around." Another poem, rich with evocative detail, illustrates the creative process, "The Painter & the Fish." There are love poems, a sadly humorous poem about his toes, and a poem about the excesses of Alexander the Great.

It's a fine book, a great reminder of things that really matter - of living the dwindling days wholeheartedly.

'' beloved on the earth"
This is Raymond Carver's last collection of poems. It was put together with the help of the love and companion of the last eleven years of his life, the writer Tess Gallagher. She also includes a long introduction to the work explaining the process of the book's making.
Carver is a poet of directness, simplicity, emotional courage. His poems are often stories built around direct observations or statements of his present mood, a mood that is also reflective on other times of life. The poems which I believe are most moving often have to do with relationships, with his father, with his former wife, with his children.
His world is often a disordered and painful one, the alcoholic's world , the world of those in debt and down. But there is in him almost always a redemptive appreciation of life, a certain hidden joy and emotional surprise which gives the poems their special life.
Among the beautiful poems of this work is one called 'Cherish' in which he tells of the tenderness in his relationship with Tess Gallagher.
I was very moved by the last poem , a fragment that sums up the man and the redemptive power of his work.

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

The Style is the Man
Raymond Carver, whom I had the fortuitous pleasure of having lunch with, along with his girfriend Tess Gallagher, a couple of years before he died, was a true artist. Emily Dickinson puts poets above the sun and God in pantheon of what's most important, and people like Raymond Carver prove her right.Although this last offering by the 20th century's greatest minimalist writer is neither his greatest nor his most minimal, it strikes the same generous chord of longing, of heart warming simplicity and heart breaking honesty, that Carver strikes elsewhere.The style is the man, wrote Buffon (in French), and sure enough that is the case here: a style of simple emotional honesty, combined with an artist's experimental will to playfulness, sufffused with a hope whose transcendent beauty is precisely its distillation from the undoctored elements of ordinary reality.This book, enhanced and completed by Tess Gallagher's wonderfully loving but unsentimental introduction, shows Carver at the end of his life; still excited about art, and the possibility of the poem form, he splices lines from Chekov stories, giving them titles and thereby
transforming them into poem epigraphs to his own measured prose. The transformation of the Chekov short story to the Carver poem perhaps underscores the poetic process itself, whittling down reality into its artistic essence--the process so aptly demonstrated by Carver, who never wrote a novel, in his short stories. As Salmon Rushdie says on the cover (I paraphrase), read this book by Carver.Read everything by Carver. Raymond Carver was a great writer. ... Read more

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Carver country
The supplier noted book as like new, but it had damage of a sticker ghost and a wrinkle on the cover.The impression that it was like new wasn't quite true. WHen asked about this the sender kindly adjusted the price.
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Tess discusses her belief that poetry reaches a reality beyond language, ... Read more

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Sixteen stories filled with characters who run the gamut from slow sizzle to high sass are brought to life in an anthology of short fiction that captures them struggling to cope with love and loss, pain and healing. 15,000 first printing." ... Read more

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great short stories
This collection of short stories is one of the best i have ever read.Mostly set in the northwest Gallagher captures the ideals and characteristics of most northwest residents.Her stories reflect themindset of this part of the country.She writes about logging, wildlife,and just general everyday life.She is the best. ... Read more

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Portable Kisses
This is a marvelous collection of contemporary love poetry. In tone and style it is very reminiscent of Pablo Neruda's 21 Love Poems. The poems not only treat romantic love in its myriad varieties but also capture thefemale passion and perspecitve in love. I have long adored the book.Indeed, it was the first collection of poems that brought poetry to lifefor me. In particular, "Your Hands which I love to Kiss" is myfavorite poem as it depicts the strange subtleties of love. If you are atall a chronic romantic, I highly recommend this work. ... Read more

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The eloquent American poet Tess Gallagher discusses the loss of her husband Raymond Carver and the life of a writer with the prolific Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi. Their heartfelt and uplifting conversation took place at "Jakuan," Jakucho Setouchi’s temple in Sagano, Japan. This stunning masterpiece of book design and construction is a work of art that reproduces the wood block and stencil prints of Keiko Hara with the exquisite lettering of typographer Maki Yamashita and the craftsmanship of master bookbinder Atsuo Ikuta. ... Read more

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a poem, illustrations by Marilyn Maricle ... Read more

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Honest.Superior word craft and imagery keep coming.
Tess Gallagher is a blessing. Readers who have experienced a rich essential quality of living will find the resonate voice of an ageless girl underneath powerfully assembled words.This collection was handed to me by a stranger in a coffee shop in Tacoma, Washington, who said only, "here, have a book of poetry." On a quick reading it seemed like superficial, self indulgent, girlish poetry. But this is not the I, me, you, we, weep at me stuff that fills chap books and keeps vanity presses in business.In this case it only serves to, very cleverly and even handedly, disguise, or vale, the soul of writer.Later the work began to unfold its complexity and came to life right out of the page.The balanced, well tempered blending of the metaphorical and the concrete and a fairly consistant cadence, the ability to play with syntax and meaning, twisting words and sentences into unpredictable and surprising contortions only enhance the necessary meaning of the work and give it life in the minds eye where all good poetry is born.

Tess is soft, sweater soft, but don't let that fool you. She is solid, like a rock.A remarkable woman. ... Read more