Beloved poet Tess Gallagher flirts with ghosts

It doesn't take long in a conversation with Tess Gallagher for the topic of mortality to spring up. She has titled her latest book of poems, "Dear Ghosts," and she says the comma is intentional.

"This is a book full of mortality, but it also a book about how we survive in another dimension," she says of her seventh book of poems. "It is about how we shuffle through with these wonderful ghosts."

In the 14 years since Gallagher's "Moon Crossing Bridge" — itself an elegy to her deceased husband, Raymond Carver — she was diagnosed with breast cancer and was successfully treated for the disease. She also spent over a decade caring for her aging mother, who died last year from Alzheimer's. Through these travails, which are intimately explored in the new book, Gallagher finds her theme which, rather than death, is the beauty of a life lived in the shadow of death.

As for the comma in the title, she says that at 62 she realizes that intention is everything to the poet. "I am addressing it to them," she says of the book. "Emily Dickinson said her poetry was a letter to the world, and this is my letter to my ghosts. We are all headed in that direction, and if we live in our dimension as people who will be ghosts, it should shrive us, it should cause us to act more responsibility."

Carver, of course, is one of those ghosts, one of a half-dozen. Included in the cast is Theodore Roethke, the writer who inspired Gallagher to begin a path toward poetry more than 40 years ago. After working briefly as a newspaper reporter as a teenager, she studied with Roethke at the University of Washington.

"I took the very last class he taught," she says. "That was the crucible, that class, because it was so intense, and his presence was so pervasive. He was such a maestro; it was like being in an orchestra of one. You could feel the emotional power of poetry. He would read people's letters in class so you got this sense that it wasn't just the poetry that mattered. Even your letters were literary events."

At Roethke's funeral, Gallagher met Stanley Kunitz, who would be another mentor. She says the most important accolade the new book has earned has come from Kunitz. He's now 100 and not quite yet a ghost, but a character in the poems nonetheless. "He said the book was 'a gift to the world and to the imagination,' " she recalls.

"Dear Ghosts," has an international cast as it documents Gallagher's travels to Ireland, Romania, Egypt and Asia. These fresh landscapes give her a wide palette and the eyes of a foreigner. "When you are seeing the deprivation," she notes of Romania, "they are binding you emotionally to those people."

That theme — of the emotional bind between cultures — dominates. In "The Dogs of Bucharest," she writes about the impact of a wave across a courtyard from a woman: "My arm lifts of itself, as if it has always known the language of arms — two widows greeting, saluting each other. Just that. A sign across this chasm of life — where to recognize the suffering of even one other, that alchemy of reception, fortifies against despair."

It was in Romania where Gallagher began to understand the depth of how suffering leads to religious belief. "You can't be in Romania without being in the presence of people's beliefs," she says. Though her own faith is a mixture of Buddhism and Christianity, in one poem she explores the "revisiting of Jesus."

"I always found the story of him walking on water to be beautiful," she notes. "I wanted to go back and reclaim that in my own way. It is the business of poets to retell those stories that we think we know."

Cancer is another suffering that Gallagher does not shy from in this book, and in "The Red Devil" she talks about the near-deadly chemotherapy that eventually saves her life. Though she says she no longer tries to disguise her own experience in her poetry — and instead claims it while aiming for a universal epiphany rather than an individual one — she admits that her cancer poems were not written until she had beaten the disease.

Even within the cancer ward, she notes, humanity and humor came through, which may be why Gallagher's poems are never sentimental or maudlin.

"There is an awful lot of laughter and amusement that goes on in treatment," she notes. "You cannot stay up against the severity indefinitely; you have to be in life. It doesn't take you very far sitting around feeling sorry for yourself."

In one poem, she writes that as her head was shaved for treatment she imagined the women in concentration camps having their hair shorn but with a different outcome ahead of them.

Poetry, Gallagher jokes, may be one of the few professions that age makes better. "That preciousness of life is in this book," she says. "The things we believe in are bound into the lives — they are not an extrapolation, they are essential elements of how we meet each other."

Several of the poems address 9/11. One tells the story of a Port Angeles cook who is beaten up because of his dark skin. War is another theme that crops up in several poems, and the ghost of Vietnam is one of the many hauntings Gallagher suffers. She has always been a political poet but the work in "Dear Ghosts," has a timelessness that gives the poems a wider humanity.

As for the 14-year gap between books, Gallagher laughs that the time has given her something to write about. "Not having been churning out poems has a kind of advantage in that the poems, when they do come, have a density and weight," she says.

Those years, she suggests, allowed her to understand the ghost terrain. "We want the matrix to be where we are standing," she says. Yet she notes her own ghosts — Carver, Roethke, her parents and others — don't stay still. "Even the dead grow with us as our need for them, our inner commerce for them, grows."

Gallagher is also an accomplished short-story writer, essayist and screenplay writer, all work that she says "helped her put muscle" on her poems. Though she's successful enough to have lived anywhere in the world, it is still Port Angeles where she resides.

"I want to be with this place, and be with the trees and hummingbirds and the sea and the mountains," she says. And with that, "a beautiful woodpecker" outside her window calls, and she is off.

Charles R. Cross is the author of several books, including "Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain." He can be reached at charlesrcross@aol.com.