Is, Is Not

The new book from Gallagher (Midnight Lantern) uses imagery to ask compelling philosophical questions: Does reality exist within the mind or outside of it? What is the moral obligation of beauty, if any? Does time proceed in a linear fashion? While impressively wide-ranging in its intellectual inquiry, the book is unified by several motifs culled from the natural world, with “rhododendrons so red,” “wild salmon,” and a seemingly endless expanse of “slack water.” Gallagher’s craft excels as she balances image and abstraction, grounding the wild flights of the speaker’s philosophical imagination. She writes, “Thinking/ as I dug into earth of my mother/ who, when my youngest brother/ died, was taken in/ by beauty, not as consolation/ but because she found him/ there as she made the garden.” Gallagher uses the proverbial garden as a vehicle for exploring questions of ethics, compassion, and inner experience. Through this skillful curation, she prompts us to ask ourselves if it is indeed a transgression to be “taken in beauty” in the face of death. While at certain moments the work veers too deeply towards abstraction (she describes a moment “coming back in an incidental way,/ claiming to be the most beautiful/ moment of my life”), the book’s subtle lyricism makes even the occasional dreaminess beautiful. [em](May) [/em]