Is, Is Not - Softcover

Tess Gallagher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780374615 ISBN 13: 9781780374611

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2019

Synopsis

Tess Gallagher's new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty. Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and journeys toward discovering the full capacity of language. Gallagher's poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop and hover daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Guided by humour, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests - the Northwest of America, the north-west of Ireland, and a West even further to the edge, beyond the physical. These landscapes are charged with invisible energies and inhabited by the people, living and dead, who shape Gallagher's poems and life. Restorative in every sense, Is, Is Not is the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write - a book of the spirit made manifest by the poet's unrelenting gaze and her intimate engagement with the mysteries that keep us reaching.

About this title

Review:

The book itself is dedicated to two great loves (the American writer Raymond Carver, and the Irish painter and storyteller, Josie Gray) and its narratives echo through time... Beneath all the places, stories and loves, this poet finds that deep resonance of common essence. There is beauty and grief and humour here; there is a gentle wisdom; there is a quiet, incremental insight that sings us awake. I treasure these poems. --Jane Mead

This book is shocking, the more I read. It is generous and beguiling and dangerous, even! It reclaims the possibility of language to not reduce, but to take its cargo right to the threshold and beyond, toward mystery, the cosmos even! Every single poem surprises and delights, going further than you thought possible - easily, yet subtly, so you re in completely different heart-territory when you finish. It's museum, tabernacle and cottage hearth. It's poetry that affirms the great miracle and alchemy when language meets pure imagination. --Danielle Vermette

About the Author:

Tess Gallagher is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and playwright. She has published many books, including five poetry titles in Britain with Bloodaxe, most recently Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems (2012), and now her latest collection, Is, Is Not (2019). She has published two collections of stories, The Lover of Horses (1986) and At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997), and two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986) and Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000). She co-authored two screenplays with Raymond Carver, and later contributed to the making of the Robert Altman film Short Cuts, based on Carver's work. She spends parts of each year in the West of Ireland, and her collection of oral stories from Ireland, Barnacle Soup, co-authored with Irish painter and storyteller Josie Gray, was published by Blackstaff Press in 2007.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1780374615
• ISBN 13: 9781780374611
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160