Perspective and introspection are plentiful in this fine retrospective collection, but Gallagher doesn’t fully see now. She speculates profoundly and eloquently, metaphysically — never astro/quantum physically, as if from any century — but our own.
Inside the event horizon of astronomy’s black hole, time and space change places, and that’s how I like to read books, backwards. It’s a good way to approach Tess Gallagher’s new retrospective collection Midnight Lantern New and Selected Poems because the most recent poems are at the end under the title Signature. Also included in the collection in chronological order are poems from Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, Willingly, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge, Portable Kisses, My Black Horse, and Dear Ghosts. The Signature poem in the last section with its name is a useful first-last step:
The father and children walking where
they would always walk in the mind
of the father’s remembering, more perfect now
than life could make it, illuminated by loss,
yet more gift than loss.
You can find in these few lines Gallagher’s poetic DNA: family, mind, memory, and paradox-juggling optimism. As a whole, Midnight Lantern provides enough light to see more than just the outlines of a portrait of the poet aged 33 to 68. Neither Sappho nor Frost are mentioned, but both feel present in the collection’s surrounding darkness. Sappho is one of the first memoirists (with Augustine) of individuality, and a woman. Frost has hope: “Take nature altogether since time began, /…And it must be a little more in favor of man.” Their dramas are personal rather than public, lyric rather than epic, neither urban nor ironic.
Her poetry also provides relief from academic culture wars. She echoes John Gardner’s emphases on clarity and morality. In her 1987 Amplitude we read “If Poetry Were Not a Morality,” which Gallagher introduces with a quotation from Jean Cocteau: “It is likely I would not have dedicated myself to poetry in this world which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not a morality.” Then she begins:
I’m the kind of woman who
when she hears Bobby McFerrin sing without words
for the first time on the car radio has to
pull over and park with the motor
running…
Continuing her self portrait, Gallagher depicts her Cherokee grandmother whose grandfather
had to be
one of those chiefs who could never
get enough horses. Who if he had two hundred
wanted a hundred more and a hundred more
after that.
This marvel concludes with a manifesto consistently exemplified in her poems:
I have to go through the world
like an overwrought
magnet, like the greedy braille of so many
about-to-be-lost memories.
… there being no answer except
not to be dead to each other…
…And even some of our soon-to-be deadness
catches up to us
as joy, as more horses than we need.
Comparing 1987’s Amplitude selected poems with those from 2006’s Dear Ghosts, the older poet speaks of herself not as a “kind of woman” but as
…the schoolgirl at the back of the class
who can’t help raising her hand toward the ceiling
even when she can’t answer
the question, lifting herself
by desire alone.
In this poem, “You Are Like That” and section, Gallagher speaks to her dead. She selects “My Unopened Life” to begin, questioning assumptions: “Why/only darkness?” answering:
So are we each lit briefly by engulfments
…yielding to sudden corridors
of light-into-light, never asking: ‘why
tell me why
all this light?’
The 2006 Dear Ghosts section includes more powerful poems conflating a haircut prior to chemo with “The Women of Auschwitz,” the poet’s “time in Cairo,” “one blue-violet night in Hawaii during/ the Vietnam War,” a surprising slap to “America 2001-2009” in the short lyric “Weather Report” which invokes a Romania “under Ceausescu” and how a poet “would codify opposition.” “What The New Day Is For” is a glorious requiem asking to be put to music:
The new day has been given
so whatever befell us yesterday
can be withstood, not as it was,
but as if we had perished
into it…
As the carriage horse…
…memory awaits the new day,
wants to be stroked…
…we have more mercy
…than the world has.
And we know this. For such knowing
makes spirits of us, sends the new day…
Did Gallagher obey the instructions she’d given herself back in 1976, in the title poem from “Instructions to the Double”?
a caress or a promise. Go
to the temple of the poets
… the one on fire
with so much it wants
to be done with. Say all the last words
and the first…:
If anyone from the country club
asks you to write poems, say
your name is Lizzie Borden.
Well, a lot happened since the memory of her young mind in “Breasts” when “The day came/ this world got its hold on me –” and her brothers could hold her down by a cotton shirt. By 1992’s Moon Crossing Bridge, mourning began: her husband, famed short story writer Raymond Carver, died at 50 in 1988. In her end Notes, Gallagher explains the title poem of that section,
‘Moon Crossing Bridge’ is a translation from the Chinese characters for the Togetsu Bridge, which spans the river Oi near Kyoto…known for the many important literary works that celebrate its beauty…As I walked across the Togetsu Bridge in late November 1990 with two Japanese friends, it occurred to me that I had literally just walked across the title of my book. The name of the bridge is said to be an allusion to the moon crossing the night sky.
Praise comes easily for this recognized poet. But she called for “all the last words,” and my son-in-law is related to Lizzie Borden. How will Tess Gallagher’s voice sound after Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Singularity when humans look like Model-T primates? It grieves me that the bridge she invokes isn’t one between C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Perspective and introspection are plentiful in this fine retrospective collection, but Gallagher doesn’t fully see now. She speculates profoundly and eloquently, metaphysically — never astro/quantum physically, as if from any century — but our own. Consider the essay “Modern Poetry, Modern Science” which cites Miroslav Holub as the only “world-class laboratory scientist…also a world-class poet.” A classy poet like Gallagher could be inspired to learn that the human eye has the same protein – cryptochrome — that lets migrating birds know how to fly South every winter. We carry a sort of internal compass that can help us see in the dark. In the glare of a century of life/global-altering knowledge, Midnight Lantern is more a lantern at noon. This is both its luster…and lack.
