There may be no American poet more overdue for an anthology than Tess Gallagher. The Port Angeles writer has 40 years of work scattered over seven volumes, some of them difficult to find. "Midnight Lantern" (Graywolf Press, 352 pp., $8) fixes that by collecting 150 already published poems and adding two dozen new ones to the mix. It is a worthy and deeply moving anthology, and one firmly rooted in the Northwest.

Gallagher was born in Port Angeles in 1943 and first studied writing at the University of Washington. There, under the tutelage of Theodore Roethke, she began to establish her poetic voice, and to publish. Later she earned an M.F.A. from the prestigious University of Iowa writing program.

The first poems in "Midnight Lantern" date from her 1976 volume, "Instructions to the Double," which won the Elliston Book Award that year for the best book of poetry from a small press. "Take care when you speak to me," reads the line that opens this anthology, and it could serve as her battle cry, a description of her spare poetic style.

A career-spanning anthology like this provides insight as to how a writer's voice shifts. Gallagher has always made strong use of storytelling, but as the years have passed, that narrator is ever more present. Reading her recent work, readers come away as if they have had a conversation with the poet, and it is that intimacy that gives her words power.

The Northwest landscape of birds, trees and water appears often, but Gallagher is not a pastoral poet per se, and the outdoor canvas is used mostly to explore the human internal. In the past decade, she has also lived in Ireland, and many of the new poems are set there. Irish names, already rich in their poetic timbre, appear frequently ("Ballindoon," "Rockingham," "Annaugh Loy," "Hargadon's," all on one page). Of constantly changing Irish weather, she writes, "If a person behaved this way we'd call them neurotic."

Departures and arrivals figure often in these poems, and love and grief are themes even in the work Gallagher wrote as a young woman. But as the anthology moves along, grief becomes a veil over much of her work, particularly, of course, in the poems Gallagher wrote after the death of her husband, Raymond Carver, in 1988.

After Carver's death, Gallagher published "Moon Crossing Bridge" in 1992. In "Midnight Lantern," there are 40 poems from that volume, by far the largest sampling from any of her books, and they are some of her most enduring. In "Embers" she writes, "to speak aloud at a grave breaks silence so another heat shows through. Not speaking, but the glow of that we spoke."

In the two decades since she wrote those words, Gallagher has survived breast cancer and witnessed the death of her mother, adding another "ghost" to her life, and this work. Yet her voice is still one that approaches mortality with an occasional whimsy that only a veteran poet, and wizened human, could muster.

In "Mr. and Mrs. Rat," she chronicles the poisoning of rats who have been eating at the bird feeder, and does so by delivering a last line that could serve as an epitaph to anyone who has lived a full life, but knows it is slowly closing: "From bonanza to the last gate."

Charles R. Cross: charlesrcross@aol.com or www.charlesrcross.com