Midnight Lantern

*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.