Tess Gallagher

Among the finest contemporary poets, Tess Gallagher is also a novelist, essayist, and a playwright. She attended the University of Washington and studied creative writing under the acclaimed poet Theodore Roethke. Gallagher has married three times - Author Raymond Carver, her third husband, passed in 1988.
(*That name should sound familiar because Carver wrote the short story Cathedral, which was one of the first pieces we read in the Norton.)

Her poems are often focused on the dynamics of family values and comparisons of the self. They are "full of doubles: shadows, reflections in eyes and water and mirrors, resemblances..., photographs, a body's impression burnt onto bedsprings in a fire," as described by Valerie Trueblood from American Poetry Review. Critics often say that Gallagher uses delicate language, associated with feminity, yet there is still an underlying strength beneath her words. Despite all these intricate ideas, Gallagher "savors the elegance of simplicity", creating stories that "resonate and linger".

Instructions to the Double may very well be her best-known work as well as her most influential collection. With these pieces, "The poems of this volume fall into two distinct categories—those representing the confessional mode and those tending toward the abstract or surreal." She uses "techniques of postmodernism, surrealism, and the concept of Carl G. Jung's shadow figure" to express the struggle of emerging as a poet from her past. The most significant recurring persona in Gallagher's poems are her father, who is often related to the land. Second to him is her late husband, Raymond Carver.

"My main obsession in the poems of late has been with how memory works or doesn't work in the creating of 'what matters' in our lives. The nature of Time is of continual interest." - Tess Gallagher

Poetry Foundation Biography

Poetry -

• Stepping Outside, Penumbra Press, 1974.
• Instructions to the Double, Graywolf Press, 1976.
• Under Stars, Graywolf Press, 1978.
• Portable Kisses, Sea Pen, 1978, expanded edition, Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1994.
• On Your Own, Graywolf Press, 1978.
• Willingly, Graywolf Press, 1984.
• Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1987.
• Moon Crossing Bridge, Graywolf Press, 1992.
• Owl-Spirit Dwelling, Trask House Books, 1994.
• My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 1995.