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Overview
This book pays tribute to the literary relationship, mutuality of influence, and companionship of writers Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver, a relationship cut short by Carver's death in 1988. Soul Barnacles is both literary history and love story, chronicling the way a surviving partner is able to carry forward the life and work of her spouse, while pursuing her own life and literary endeavors.In essays, letters, and interviews written after her husband's untimely death, Gallagher explores the inextricable bonds that linked their lives and their writing. The book opens with excerpts from a journal of the couple's last trip to Europe, and a selection of Gallagher's introductions to Carver's posthumous collections.
The next section focuses primarily on Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," a film based on Carver's short stories, and provides a rare, quietly dramatic look a poet in Hollywood, determined to see the dignified transformation of one art form into another. The collection concludes with interviews that touch upon the poet's grieving process, the solitude and intensity of a writer's life, and the ways in which her relationship to Carver has continued to evolve, even after death.
Tess Gallagher's poetry collections include Portable Kisses, Instructions to the Double, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Willingly. She is also author of short-story collections At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and the essay collection A Concert of Tenses.
Synopsis
Documents that chronicle the story of a literary partnership and marriage that did not end with death
Library Journal
Before writer Raymond Carver swore off alcohol forever, a friend of his called him "the most unhappy man I'd ever met," and even the author himself spoke of that period as "the Bad Raymond days." Between October 1976 and January 1977, Carver was hospitalized four times for acute alcoholism, but, on June 2, 1977, he stopped drinking and fewer than six months later met fellow writer Gallagher, who became his soulmate until his death in 1988 at age 50. Gallagher dealt with her ragged grief at Carver's passing in the poetry collection Moon Crossing Bridge; and this new book takes a more distanced view of their relationship. The journal entries, letters, forewords to books, interviews, and essays gathered here don't pretend to afford a systematic view of their life together, but individual pieces result in a more profound depth of perception that any system could ever provide. Soul Barnacles will find an obvious audience in students of contemporary literature, but its various parts tell a larger story of love and loss, ruin and repair; it details a relationship so intense, both before and after the death of one of its members, as to be more than of merely critical interest.--David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.