Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems - Hardcover

"Lush, entrancing, and thorny, this invaluable retrospective is crowned by 30 stellar new poems that find Gallagher in a beautifully earthy, coy, sharply observant, and cosmically affectionate mode." --Booklist

"[Those] who take sustenance from Gallagher's words will find they have come to the right place here." --Publishers Weekly

"It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images." --Joyce Carol Oates on Tess Gallagher

"Tess Gallagher's is perhaps the most deeply moving and spiritual and intensely intelligent poetry being written in America today." --William Heyen on Tess Gallagher

"Never morose, sentimental, or embittered, Gallagher opens herself to the intricate miseries and mysteries of love in poems that are worthy of the Pulitzer Prize." --The Seattle Times on Tess Gallagher

*A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Poetry Book of Fall 2011*

We brave into ourselves each time
we put on our lantern-light
and step out—as a gleam steps
out its overlapping forms
to lift a path from its nest of darkness.
—from "Midnight Lantern"

In Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, Tess Gallagher 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 hardscrabble 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.