Midnight Lantern

Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, the daughter of a logger and a longshoreman. A poet, essayist, fiction writer and playwright, she has published many books, including three poetry titles in Britain with Bloodaxe: My Black Horse: New & Selected Poems (1995), Portable Kisses (1996) and Dear Ghosts, (2007). Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems is due from Graywolf Press in the US in October 2011. She has published two collections of stories, The Lover of Horses (1986) and At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997), and two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986) and Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000). She co-authored two screenplays with Raymond Carver, and later contributed to the making of the Robert Altman film Short Cuts, based on Carver's work. She has also written introductions to books such as A New Path to the Waterfall and All of Us by Raymond Carver and Carver Country. She spends parts of each year in the West of Ireland, near Sligo, where she bought lambs to save them from the butcher and has since begun weaving wall hangings from their fleeces. Her collection of oral stories from Ireland, Barnacle Soup, co-authored with Irish painter and storyteller Josie Gray, was published by Blackstaff Press in 2007.

'Gallagher's poems resound with exquisite beauty and remind me once more how it is not subject but its rendering that redeems and uplifts' - Boston Globe 'Tess Gallagher's is perhaps the most deeply moving and spiritual and intensely intelligent poetry being written in America today' - William Heyen 'It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerising rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images' - Joyce Carol Oates 'She is outstanding among her contemporaries in the naturalness of her inflection, the fine excess of her spirit, and the energy of her dramatic imagination' - Stanley Kunitz