Instructions to the Double: Poems

by Tess Gallagher

Book by Gallagher, Tess

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading the 1976 graywolf press edition (their first full-length), one of 1500, hand-set & hand-printed. i've rarely felt this way about the physical form of a book? picked it up at a second-hand place in town & just, oh wow. anyway the poems are astounding, standing quiet & reading a few aloud before work every day lends a quiet for hours.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 G162i 1976

[Raffy Rillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The day you came
this world got its hold on me.
Summer grass and the four of us pounding hell
out of each other for God knows what
green murder of the skull.
Swart nubbins, I noticed you then,
my mother shaking a gritty rag from the porch
to get my shirt on this minute. Brothers,
that was the parting of our ways, for then
you got me down by something else than flesh.
By the loose skin of a cotton shirt
you kept me to the ground
until the bloody gout hung in my face like a web.


Little mothers, I can’t find your children.
I have looked in a man
who moved through air like a god.
He brought me clouds
and the loose stars of his goings.
Another kissed me on a pier in Georgia,
but there was blood on his hands,
bad whiskey in the wind. The last one,
he made me a liar until I stole
what I could not win. Loves,
what is this mirror you have left me in?

[Stephen Kiernan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1976 collection varies widely from poems that are jewels of language and image, to nearly private and difficult verse. A fine work that is not for beginners.