PORT ANGELES — The internationally known poet and Port Angeles native Tess Gallagher is home again to give a free reading Thursday of her acclaimed book Midnight Lantern.
The poems here “partly seduce, partly overwhelm,” critic Fran Brearton of The Guardian wrote.
Listeners can decide for themselves just how seductive and overwhelming during Gallagher’s appearance at 12:35 p.m. Thursday in the Little Theater at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
Admission is free to the public.
Gallagher, who divides her time between her blufftop home just outside Port Angeles and a cottage in County Sligo, Ireland, named her ninth book Midnight Lantern because writing — and reading — have the power to bring light into one’s dark days.
“When we come into our midnights, we need our resources,” spiritual and otherwise, Gallagher has said.
“Poetry for me is spiritual strength . . . It is there to help you strengthen your spiritual muscles.”
The poet herself has survived breast cancer and built a new life for herself after the death of her husband, the famed writer Raymond Carver.
In recent months, Gallagher has crisscrossed the continent, reading from Midnight Lantern at venues from New York City to Town Hall in Seattle.
She continues to love her life in Port Angeles, she said. The beauty, along with her fond memories of girlhood here, are what nourish her.
Gallagher was born 69 years ago to Leslie and Georgia Morris Bond, who came west to work in the woods.
She was the eldest of five and grew up fishing with her brothers.
“There may be no American poet more overdue for an anthology than Tess Gallagher,” critic Charles Cross wrote in The Seattle Times.
Midnight Lantern “is a worthy and deeply moving anthology, and one firmly rooted in the Northwest,” Cross added.
Body of work
The book encompasses 40 years of writing, plus 20 new poems, and joins a body of work that also includes Gallagher’s short-story collections The Lover of Horses and Other Stories and At the Owl Woman Saloon, and her poetry collections Dear Ghosts and Moon Crossing Bridge, among others.
She also has released Distant Rain, a conversation with the highly respected Buddhist nun Jacucho Setouchi of Kyoto, Japan — which is both an art book and a cross-cultural moment.
Gallagher also is the author of Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, and A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry.
With her companion Josie Gray, Gallagher published Barnacle Soup: Stories from the West of Ireland.
She holds degrees from the universities of Washington and Iowa and has received a Guggenheim fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.
Writing doesn’t get any easier as one goes along, Gallagher has said.
“Developing one’s vision,” she said, “is a lifelong enterprise.”
Gallagher’s reading Thursday is a joint presentation by Peninsula College’s Foothills Writers Series and Studium Generale lecture series.
For information about these programs and their free, public presentations, visit www.PenCol.edu, search for the Peninsula College page on Facebook or phone 360-452-9277.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
