Tess Gallagher's Under Stars … evokes commonplace images and events, and renders a familiar world in beautifully precise terms. Like Instructions for the Double, Gallagher's excellent first book, Under Stars presents, in rigorously pared-back language, a series of observations, or states of feeling before they pass into conscious observations. Some of the poems are in the poet's voice, others are in the voices of strangers, or a voice suggested by a "careless waltz" at an Irish wedding or a melancholy ballad. Some interpenetrate one another; the boundaries between people dissolve; the past is present in quiet, unobtrusive images. Belfast violence, for instance, in the winter of 1976, is evoked in oblique memories, in terms of dreams that blend uneasily with reality. (pp. 103-04)

Some of the poems reach for obscure conclusions, and I am not always certain of the voice that is being evoked, but it is impossible to read...