Is, Is Not
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The new book from Gallagher (Midnight Lantern) uses imagery to ask compelling philosophical questions: Does reality exist within the mind or outside of it? What is the moral obligation of beauty, if any? Does time proceed in a linear fashion? While impressively wide-ranging in its intellectual inquiry, the book is unified by several motifs culled from the natural world, with "rhododendrons so red," "wild salmon," and a seemingly endless expanse of "slack water." Gallagher's craft excels as she balances image and abstraction, grounding the wild flights of the speaker's philosophical imagination. She writes, "Thinking/ as I dug into 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." Gallagher uses the proverbial garden as a vehicle for exploring questions of ethics, compassion, and inner experience. Through this skillful curation, she prompts us to ask ourselves if it is indeed a transgression to be "taken in beauty" in the face of death. While at certain moments the work veers too deeply towards abstraction (she describes a moment "coming back in an incidental way,/ claiming to be the most beautiful/ moment of my life"), the book's subtle lyricism makes even the occasional dreaminess beautiful.
