Moon Crossing Bridge by Tess Gallagher
**Overview of "Moon Crossing Bridge" by Tess Gallagher**
"Moon Crossing Bridge" is a poignant collection of poems by Tess Gallagher, written as an elegy in response to the death of her husband, acclaimed writer Raymond Carver. Spanning ninety-nine pages, the book contains sixty poems divided into six sections, which are introduced by quotes from renowned poets like Pablo Neruda and Marina Tsvetayeva, adding an international dimension to the work. The collection reflects Gallagher's journey through grief in the two and a half years following Carver's passing, exploring themes of loss, memory, and recovery. Although critics debate whether the poems adhere to traditional stages of grieving, the overarching narrative of the collection captures the illumination that can arise from profound sorrow.
Geographically, "Moon Crossing Bridge" connects the landscapes of Port Angeles, Washington, where Gallagher and Carver lived, and Japan, where Gallagher traveled to oversee the translation of Carver’s work. The title references a Chinese ideogram and symbolizes the transition from darkness into light, mirroring Gallagher's journey through grief. The later sections of the collection shift toward themes of recovery, illustrating Gallagher's ongoing exploration of personal and collective loss. This work not only stands as a testament to Gallagher's grief but also contributes to her broader examination of gender, mourning, and emotional resilience in her poetry.
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Subject Terms
Moon Crossing Bridge by Tess Gallagher
First published: 1992
Type of work: Poetry
Form and Content
Tess Gallagher, in her poetic elegy Moon Crossing Bridge, responds to the death of her husband, writer Raymond Carver. The ninety-nine-page collection includes sixty poems, about half of which previously appeared in magazines and anthologies. These poems are divided into six loosely chronological sections, separated by numbers and quotations rather than by titles. Among those quoted in the introductions to the sections are poets Pablo Neruda, Izumi Shikibu, and Marina Tsvetayeva, giving the collections an international flavor. According to Gallagher, the poems in Moon Crossing Bridge were written in the two and a half years after Carver’s death on August 2, 1988.
While critics disagree about whether Moon Crossing Bridge follows stages of grieving, the title itself, derived from a Chinese ideogram for the Togetsu Bridge near Kyoto, Japan, shows the pattern of moonlight crossing a bridge and moving, as the poems do, to a sort of illumination of the grief.
The six sections of the book tie into the elegy as a whole. Though the early parts of the book explore painful memories, even through part 3, which is referred to as “The Valentine Elegies,” part 6 includes what one critic calls “poems of recovery.” The elegy centers geographically both in Port Angeles, Washington, where Gallagher and Carver lived, and in Japan, where Gallagher traveled in 1990 to oversee the translations of Carver’s fiction into Japanese and to read her own work.
Moon Crossing Bridge was followed a month later by its companion work Portable Kisses (1992), a collection of love poems that speak of a return to sensual love.
The content of Moon Crossing Bridge is grieving, a theme that Gallagher has continually explored in her writing. Among her personal losses for which she grieves are the death of her fifteen-year-old brother when she was twenty, the murder of a close uncle, two divorces (one related to ideological conflicts of the Vietnam era), the death of her father from lung cancer, and the death of her spouse, Raymond Carver, from lung and brain cancer. In the essay “The Poem as a Reservoir for Grief” (1986), Gallagher explores the relationship between grieving and poetry. She contends that, because contemporary life in the United States is lived in the present, experiencing grief has become harder. This difficulty lies in the nature of grief, a “retroactive emotion” that requires repeated returns to a loss if this loss is to become a “meaningful contribution to our own becoming.” Gallagher further contends that denying the experience of grieving has made “a certain emotional unavailability” part of the modern temperament. She believes that poetry has a long history of being a reservoir for human losses—that, through poetry, losses can be transformed when one experiences fully the disintegration “of loss, its refusals.” Before the writing of this essay, Gallagher had written poems of grieving for her brother, her uncle, and other early loves. After her father’s death, poetry became, once again, a reservoir. Moon Crossing Bridge, however, is the most vital application of Gallagher’s theory of the relationship between poetry and grieving. As she concludes in her essay, “the experiencing of grief . . . allows us to value fully those events, those people who are irreplaceable.” Through Moon Crossing Bridge, Gallagher experiences her grief for one of her irreplaceable loves.
Context
Moon Crossing Bridge, Gallagher’s fifth collection of poems, was an immediate success. It was selected by the American Library Association (ALA) as one of only two books of poetry on its 1993 Notable Books List. It also won a Washington State Governor’s Award in October of 1993. The poetry in Moon Crossing Bridge and, even more so, in Portable Kisses moves into exploration of gender issues, particularly a feminine heterosexual view of mourning, recovery, and passion. The gender explorations in the 1992 works, however, are quite different from those in Gallagher’s earlier work.
In Gallagher’s collection of short stories The Lover of Horses (1982), for example, she explores complex gender relations with more subdued passion. In “The Girls,” Ada Gilman’s daughter Billie allows her mother to ride along from Springfield to Salem, Oregon, where Billie will do a sales promotion while Ada looks for her girlhood friend of forty-three years earlier, Esther Cox. To Ada’s despair, Esther has had a stroke and can no longer remember their friendship. Esther, nevertheless, likes Ada and invites her to stay the night. During the visit, Ada cherishes lying next to her old friend on the bed as they visit, but during the return trip to Springfield with Billie, Ada sees a clearcut patch of forest, a metaphor for Esther’s memory loss, and feels as if she has been slapped by it. Billie, Ada, and Esther, who are typical of Gallagher’s female characters, appear neither larger nor smaller than life. They are “of” life, with the flaws and complexities of real people. The same is true of Gallagher’s male characters, such as Mel in “The Wimp.” The female narrator, Mel’s wife, is called a bitch by her brutish brother Gordon at a birthday gathering at his home. Mel intercedes only to say, “That’s enough, Gordon.” Mel and his wife leave, but the narrator becomes increasing distraught that Mel did not defend her honor. Only after much introspection does she see Mel as he really is: “He’s a short bald man who likes to go fishing and to put puzzles together, and he sells trailer houses.” He is neither a hero nor a wimp. She concludes, after she sees him avoid another confrontation, this time by giving money to a belligerent panhandler, that Mel is simply avoiding the pervasive “dangers of manhood.” She sees him as a “peaceable good man” whom she had “meant to squander with blows against [her] brother.”
Gallagher’s writing is filled with such sketches of gender relations, and she explores well the need for women to empower themselves. Gallagher contends, regarding her reflections on her own life, “that women even more than children often serve a long apprenticeship to physically and psychically inflicted threat and pain.” She concludes that, as a result of this knowledge, women “learn how unreasonable treatment and physical pain may be turned aside by an act of will.” The empowerment that results is a core theme in Gallagher’s writing.
Bibliography
Bachman, Merle. “Taking the Kiss.” Poetry Flash: A Poetry Review and Literary Calendar for the West, June, 1992, 1, 4-5, 7-9, 27. This lengthy interview explores Gallagher’s views on poetry, especially on the force behind Moon Crossing Bridge.
Gallagher, Tess. A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986. A collection of Gallagher’s essays with photographs, this book introduces readers to Gallagher as a critic of poetry and as a poet. “My Father’s Love Letters,” the introductory essay, artfully sketches Gallagher’s early years. Another essay, “The Poem as a Reservoir for Grief,” illuminates Moon Crossing Bridge.
Gallagher, Tess. The Lover of Horses: and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. This collection of Gallagher’s short stories contains several works that are particularly well suited to analysis of gender relationships.
Gallagher, Tess. Portable Kisses. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1992. This collection of love poems, which came out a month after Moon Crossing Bridge, speaks of a return to sensual love.
Heuving, Jeanne. “‘To Speak Aloud at a Grave’: Tess Gallagher’s Poems of Mourning and Love.” Northwest Review 32, no. 1 (January 15, 1994): 744-760. Heuving analyzes Moon Crossing Bridge from several literary perspectives, including those of feminist and biographical criticism. She also ties Moon Crossing Bridge to its companion volume, Portable Kisses.
McKinley, James. “An Active Calm: An Interview with Tess Gallagher.” New Letters 59, no. 4 (1993): 56-65. McKinley directs his interview at exploring the imagery in and the psychology of Moon Crossing Bridge.
Marshall, John Douglas. “Widow’s Work.” Los Angeles Times Magazine, January 12, 1992, 18-20, 35, 36. Marshall’s interview combines analysis and biographical information to illuminate Gallagher’s poetry, especially Moon Crossing Bridge and Portable Kisses.