Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems

*A "Publishers Weekly" Top Ten Poetry Book of Fall 2011*

"We brave into ourselves each time "
"we put on our lantern-light "
"and step out as a gleam steps "
"out its overlapping forms "
"to lift a path from its nest of darkness. "
" " from "Midnight Lantern"

In "Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems," Tess Gallagher collects her indispensable work from forty years of writing poetry, along with an ample new section written in the west of Ireland. Included in this generous book are Gallagher's signature nocturnes for the changing Pacific Northwest, for her hardscrabble childhood, and for her late husband, Raymond Carver, and others. Her challenging new work confronts a tumultuous century's worth of art, warfare, and illness, while certifying the stubborn resilience of poetry and love. Astonishing, insightful, mischievous, an inimitable "seeing-into experience," "Midnight Lantern "is the essential book by a poet in the prime of her power.