Midnight Lantern

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.