Tess Gallagher's Instructions to the Double takes its title seriously. It operates on several levels of dialectic: the redemption and cruelty of the family, the notions of continuity and change, of absence and presence, of leaving and returning. The exploration of the family is central to the book: in "Coming Home," Gallagher expresses tenderness toward her mother and simultaneously recognizes the necessity and brutality of her leaving home…. But perhaps the central concern of the book is absence, "finally, it is the missing cloud that concerns us…. If absence deserves, as you say it / does, a voice which blinds itself / and recovers, let me complete / the assurance." There are many moving poems in this … collection, mature and assured in voice and vision, compelling in imagery and use of line. And finally it is its balance, its wavering between ambivalence and resolution, that makes Instructions to the Double so rewarding: "And / there is less doubt, yes or no, / for whatever you have been compelled to say / more than once." (pp. 245-46)
Ira Sadoff, "A Chronicle of Recent Poetry," in The Antioch Review (copyright © 1977 by the Antioch Review Inc.; reprinted by permission of the Editors), Vol. 35, Nos. 2-3, Spring-Summer, 1977, pp. 237-47.∗
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