Is, Is Not: Poems

by Tess Gallagher

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 hovers daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Tess Gallagher’s poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop. Guided by humor, 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 Northwest 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.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

Published May 7, 2019

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

[Darrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were many very good poems in this longish volume of poetry. The more I read poetry, also, I find I am more in touch with the differences between poets, having read this book almost immediately after reading Ellen Bass's Like A Beggar.

In the Company of Flowers on page 9 is one of the first poems I took note of.

In The Company of Flowers

all day, coming away
like an ordinary person who
might have been at a till. Thinking
as I dug into the earth of my mother
who, when my youngest brother
died, was taken in
by beauty, not as consolation
but because she found him
there as she made the garden.

Each day she tended it
he kept a little more
of her. If ever I doubt
the power of the dead, I walk
her garden in May, rhododendrons
so red, so white their clustered goblets
spill translucent tongues of light at the rim
of the sea. And it is ordinary

to be so accompanied,
so fused to the silence of all that,
as it eludes me, as I am taken in.

Surely my reappearance must wear
the borrowed abundance she
gave me that morning
I was born

Others in this book that stood out for me are Blind Dog/Seeing Girl, Dream cancel, Glass impresses, and Correction. Here is a bit from Blind Dog/Seeing Girl that I liked:

"Even the girl knows in her sighted
witnessing: we are each
lost, and beholden until,
with deer-like tentative stepping,
each invisible threshold yields, and
still calling in her useless voice,
the girl forfeits all notion of possessing
the zigzagged way her exactly there dog
at last hazards herself into

her waiting arms. And isn't it joy
the dog expresses as the world
dissolves into just that moment
she has magically united with
her very own missing girl."

Tess Gallagher's poetry is expressive and pithy and I really enjoyed the twists and turns my mind had to make to figure out the meaning of what she was trying to express in her poetry. She spends time in the west of Ireland as well as the pacific northwest of the United States and she writes poetry inspired by both of these locations as well as others. I will definitely keep a look out for more of her books going forward.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

CURFEW

November and a slim band of daylight
slinks through drizzle.
She has declared No Visitors
past ten p.m. in her cottage. She aims
to set a dish of calm before night
as it intrudes upon the mossy footpath
of comings and goings.

Instead of “Come in” she says “Not now”
and climbs the steep steps
of her hillside to commune
with anything but people. In this way
she has agitated the spirits of the place,
the villagers, an entire clan. Who
does she think she is,
assuming she can renew herself among stars?

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Dindsenchas' is an Irish word, Gallagher explains in the concluding essay to her outstanding collection of poems; it means "a totality of topography, history, ecology, animal life, non-human life, spirit beings, and human impact on a place--all the living and the dead IN A NON-LINEAR SIMULTANEITY OF PRESENCE (her emphasis)." So stands her latest collection of poems.

'Dindsenchas' serves as an apt description of these poems. She writes elegant short poems, rich narrative poems, philosophical explorations, and tributes to the many people who she has come in contact with living in Ireland and in the Pacific Northwest. My favorite poems include the title poem, "Is, Is Not," "As the Diamond," "Dream Cancel," "Oliver," "Opening," and "Caress." Next year when I read it again, I will like different ones, and that is fine with me.

Gallagher has become a national treasure. Her poetry is personal, rich in language, elegant, international, and transcendent. I treasure this book too.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This dense collection of poems has many wonderful lines and images, some of which I didn't fully understand. This is a collection I would enjoy owning, reading slowly and sitting with. Gallagher writes from the northwest of the states: Port Townsend, Washington and from the northwest of Ireland where she spends significant time; her poetry is imbued with the imagery of these similar but different landscapes. She also writes with a lifetime of love, loss, and experience informing her telling with beauty, humor and specificity.

Tess Gallagher, Opening

I entered this world not wanting
to come. I'll leave it not
wanting to go. All this while,
when it seemed there were two doors,
there was only one - this
passing through.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poet leads an interesting life, dividing her time between Ireland and her home in the Pacific Northwest. She uses complex language, choosing highly erudite vocabulary. Her poems are, to me, at times inaccessible. I prefer to read poetry in which the words more readily convey meaning, yet marvel at Gallagher's beautiful command of language.

[Everett · Rating 5 out of 5]

From „Is, Is Not“

„Opening”
I entered this world not wanting
to come. I’ll leave it not
wanting to go. All this while,
when it seemed there were two doors,
there was only one —this
passing through”

A breathtaking collection of poems from one of the finest living poets. Tess Gallagher is a sorceress of sensuality and dreamy imagery.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each poem is a gem, refracting truths of a mindful, perceptive, exquisitely wrought consciousness. Some favorites:
“Ambition”
“Blind Dog/Seeing Girl”
“Sully”
“Retroactive Father”
“Reaching”
Forget it—just read the whole enchanting collection!

[Ida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relatable but not simplistic.