This principle of
discordia concors aligns her work with pre-Socratic philosophy, metaphysical poetry, and Zen koans. "I like to have these contradictions in view," she wrote in
A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986), "not for one to cancel out the other, but so that the whole picture is before me." In keeping with this non-Aristotelian outlook, Gallagher has termed her favored mode of expression "lyric-narrative," a hybrid of song and story whose antecedents include broadside ballads and heroic epics. The result, whether her medium is poetry or prose, is a haunting blend of precision and suggestiveness, tenderness and toughness, that has made her, as the short-story writer Pam Houston wrote in the
Washington Post (14 September 1997), "the female voice of the Pacific Northwest."
Tess Gallagher was born Theresa Jeanette Bond in Port Angeles, Washington, on 21 July 1943. She was the first child of migrants to the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula, the area between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Mountains. The strait is both barrier and gateway, separating the United States from Canada and opening the harbors of Seattle's Puget Sound to the shipping lanes of the Pacific.
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