Portable Kisses

by Tess Gallagher

Book by Tess Gallagher

Genres: Poetry, Literature

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1978

About the author

Tess Gallagher is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and My Black Horse. She will release her collection of New and Selected Poems entitled Midnight Lantern in October 2011. Gallagher is also the author of Amplitude, Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, and three collections of short fiction: At the Owl Woman Saloon, The Lover of Horses and Other Stories and The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories. She also spearheaded the publication of Raymond Carvers Beginners in Library of Americas complete collection of his stories released Fall 2009. She spends time in a cottage on Lough Arrow in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland and also lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington"

Reviews

[Lily Sieber]

i prefer less straightforward poetry but this was a nice collection, very sweet and a little sad

[Angela]

I normally "get" poetry, but not this time. Don't be fooled by the slenderness of Portable Kisses; it's a hell of a book to finish. This is the third time in the past year that I've picked it up, but I was finally determined to get through it. I don't care for Tess Gallagher's style, which is rambling and full of tangential metaphors. The concept of Portable Kisses is bizarre. Sometimes the kisses are actions between people, other times the kisses are personified (the kiss as a CIA agent, the kiss as a contestant on a lie-detecting game show), but they're almost always abstracted in some maddening way. Forget any notion of romance or eroticism, these kisses are obtuse and full of sadness. What struck me the most about this collection is the amount of times she writes about having kisses for a deceased man (Kisses was published four years after the death of Gallagher's third husband, Raymond Carver). The idea of a spiritual love that transcends death is nice, in theory, but the poems are so clunky:

I spot it like you snap an ace down
on formica. "Pull over,"
I tell my friend. We've just eaten
pancakes with gravy on the side.
Life is rich but the future
could tumble. We walk in
feeling Texan, ready for anything,
and sit down at the bar
in the beery shoe-dark of the place.

(from "The Destiny Club, p.35)
Ah yes, you can really see Carver's influence here. The boring Americans who are always looking to get drunk.

She applied a little pumice
to a knee. Felt unashamedly
a not unpleasant subterranean streaming. Great-bladdered
in the luke warm bath, she raised the temperature
one salty degree.

(from "The Kiss in Her Bath", p. 53)
Wow. I was really not expecting to read about a kiss incarnate taking a piss in her bubble bath.

During all this time, a long white beard
had grown around the kiss. But the word "white"
only occurred like the ghost of a firefly
in one of their minds or in the mind of
the tunnel. Maybe the beard was ebony
as her teeth pressing the tunnel into his cranium
within which, as they discovered, a perfectly matched
tunnel had always existed, and was now linked
to hers. Where were they tunneling to?

(from "Harmless, p. 62)
Perfect example of Gallagher's poetry. Uninspired diction, metaphors that go nowhere, and a poetic occasion built up around a half-assed abstract idea.

The grass, the wet grass across
my ankles when he pulled me
astride. "I'll tell you something
you won't forget in twenty years," he said,
like the last words before sleep.
"Tell me," I said.
But he didn't say more.
he wouldn't say more.
The horse took use down to the sea
and he wouldn't say more.

(from "Like the Sigh of Women's Hair, p.95)
Some more Carver-esque bullshit. Flat dialogue, devoid of action and emotion.


I only kind of enjoyed the last poem. And even then, I wonder if the joy was from the poem or from the feeling of finishing and getting rid of this godawful book.

Poems that I liked:
"Elegy with a Blue Pony."

=1/56 (1.8%) poems that I liked.

[Greer Loewen]

3.5 stars

There are a handful of poems in this collection that I instantly loved, and at times Gallagher creates phrases that are at once perfectly contained yet probing. There is a curiosity about her lovers, her own relationship to desire, and death which at its best can be described as … the opposite of solemn. She does not portray grief as a quiet affair, even when a poem’s mood is reverent, I would refrain from calling them subdued. The emotional landscape she creates is always fervent, rich and lush with sound. But the immediate rush of awe and resonance I often seek in poetry was missing for me at times.

Definitely a book I will return to; it’s impossible to predict how poems will linger.

[Raffy Rillo]

is made of lingering.
While the kisses of others
tear
greedily the pages of the face,
she uncloaks
against time, against breath,
against
memory. She releases the velvet
behind
darkness,
shines there
like a green scarf
on a green bough,
outside
his window,
all undulation
and savoring.
Not wanting
that
which he has, but that which is his
as he can never give it.
Not to reap fervency.
But fervently
as the fir bough in
sea-wind
to yearn to him and so to draw
outwardly
his roaming,
weightless
gusts and
shudders.

[Stan]

I read this one on the plane after meeting Tess Gallagher at a conference. The poems are from earlier in life (the book published in the 1990s but refer to life back into the 1960s), which fit my nostalgic mood as well as the fact that my copy was now signed by the author. The loose thread that ties the poems together is the embodiment of The Kiss, somewhat like that medieval conception of Death as a character. I'm looking forward to reading more of Gallagher's poetry.

[Alexander]

I read this for a couple of reasons.

In college, I had been turned on to T. Gallagher's short stories in a writer's workshop. It was not known to me at that time that she was married to Raymond Carver and I had read A LOT of him, so learning of that later pressed me with greater interest to revisit her years later.

I also wanted to read another woman. I had been flipping through Emily Dickinson over the past two years but much of what I have been reading has been male writers (and some obscure female authors).

This was my first introduction to her poetry and I chose it, sappily, because of the title.

Mainly because poetry is one of my favorite reads when I am not reaching for books with the regular fervor I am accustomed and also because I could not be any more sick and through with the concept of love right now, that I wanted to warm my being to actually caring about another person in that kind of way.

Poetry, kissing, is sharing time and, like with reading, it is sharing a special kind of time, where there is nothing else in the world but the individual subjects and their personal worlds, their intended focus. There are, or there should be, no outside influences, distractions, etc., to pull you from that deep appreciation of the matter or person you've chosen to fixate on.

To enjoy poetry, you certainly need a quiet mind and a lush imagination and to enjoy kissing, being in love, you'll also need a quiet mind, imagination, otherwise the world competes and usually wins, since it offers untold possibilities and reasoning matters out will kill the heart every time.

In a well crafted poem, as Gallagher manages, you will not discover her one note that lay on the page as the specific word chosen, if you are entertaining so many others notes and tones and words simultaneously, and you'll not stop to relish and enjoy what is yours for what you imagine might be yours.

So yes, to kissing and poetry, rehabilitation, warmth and kindness, vulnerability not abused, and all that good stuff needed to appreciate a tender moment embracing your lover and their poetry. Go Tess.

[Biscuits]

I was not impressed with the use of the "kiss" theme. I though it felt like a cheap gimmick. The topics were interesting ideas that I often find intriguing (the complications of love), but the language and style did not combine to move me. About half way through, the reading of this book got tedious.

[Everett]

The theme is fantastic, kept declaring I was carrying a book with me, "it´s totally portable," to whomever cared, before reading out my newest favorite to them. One Kiss might be the best, though Elegy with a Blue Pony, and Fan Shaped Kiss are also really good. These poems range from sassy to serious, from light to heartbreaking all in one totally portable volume-many angles of love.

[Nancy]

While I generally admire Gallagher as a poet, and appreciate her female perspective on love, this book didn’t quite do it for me—liked some, didn’t like others.

[Doug]

The attempted theme pulled me in, but in the end it didn't work. Too many of the poems seemed forced and too many lines were "on the nose," lacking irony.