[Tess Gallagher's] beautifully designed second book, Under Stars … shows her braving the most difficult of entanglements: unlike almost all other poets of her generation I have read, she faces up, in every line of her work, to the full engagement with language…. Her poems evince a syntactic regeneration, a new involvement with the processes and passage of time.

Gallagher's work requires enough liveliness in the reader to follow her through facet after facet of grammatical inclination, to listen to her language with alertness for the rhythms and interaction of her syntactical groupings. It is tempting to take poetry like this and quote it until the blood runs. (pp. 94, 96)

The apparent simplicity of Gallagher's way of speaking turns out to be difficult to follow because she is dodging through the most intricate of alien entanglements, the movements of the human mind itself. Who has decreed to our younger poets...