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 Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images. She is clearly one of the most gifted and promising of our younger poets. (p. 104)
Joyce Carol Oates, "The Authority of Timelessness: 'Under Stars'," in The Ontario Review (copyright © 1980 by The Ontario Review), No. 12, Spring-Summer, 1980, pp. 103-04.
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