This Minute

By Jean Gallagher
Selected by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

This Minute is a connected whole, in which the verse is driven by strong intellectual excitement, evident in the energetic movement of the lines and in a vocabulary that switches easily from the colloquial to the exact. There is an urgent voice, felt close at hand. And there is a skill in handling and matching the size of a poem to its subject that makes each invigorating to read—one arrives slightly out of breath. These poems convey a “metaphysical” meaning as well as a bodily intimacy. They are luminous, discovering rather than manufacturing their metaphors as the most exact way of speaking.

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"These poems convey a metaphysical meaning as well as a bodily intimacy."— Publisher's Weekly

"This Minute is brilliant and surprising, full of history, invention, wit, humor, motion, stillness, time, no-time--and finally stands empty, like a desert father or mother, glad to 'give [her] inventions away.'"—Jean Valentine

"Here are poems , by Jean Gallagher, that knock me for a loop. They are work I didn't know I was waiting for - intoxicated, true to reality, blindly and rightly trustful of language. Her themes are springboards; they cause a language for ideas that dive into joy. Hers is language at its most dynamic, full of exuberant speculation. The poems speak out. The poems light us up. They are brilliant." —Marie Ponsot