Gallowglass

Susan Tichy

Tichy is a poet embedded: with U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, twined together through history; in the landscape disrupted by war, perseverating on a deer killed by a mountain lion, or hearing direction in birdsong; and in the language of war—“gallowglass” is a corruption of a Gaelic word for “mercenary soldier,” and dark, ancient ballads appear like forensic evidence. Surrounded by cultural touchstones from Pythagoras to the Grateful Dead, Tichy refuses to let the reader’s gaze, or her own, turn from the violence of modern living.

“Elliptical and allusive, brilliant and disturbing, Susan Tichy’s Gallowglass raises the art of collage that defined her earlier Bone Pagoda to a new level of richness and complexity. Written mostly in couplets or single-line stanzas, the poems retain formal composure and imagistic clarity even as they cross, moment to moment, the permeable borders between private memory and public record, elegy and war. Unsettling both our comfort and our aesthetic expectations, Tichy superimposes Iraq and Afghanistan on Vietnam, birdsong and ballad and art on recent history. It is difficult to think of another poet who uses experimentation to such fine and expansive purpose. An exquisitely challenging book.” —Martha Collins

“Elegy’s heart is no museum in which the loved and lost person and/or world are placed in the airless confines of perfect witness; elegy’s heart is a wound. Perhaps this poet’s gift to us who read her is not in learning how to heal but in learning how to dwell—the wound being this place of dwelling, and woundedness a form of initiation. Wound is the paradoxical gift, opening one to the same world, the continuing experience of the world, which causes the damage. Susan Tichy’s is a poetry that say it is ongoing, it is going on, continually, all of it—pain and wonder, world and word, they are not relics when they are wounded, not debris though disparate. These are poems of startling intimacy, poems whose courage is not in girding courage together, but in loosening it, opening it, showing how the personal is no refuge, but is instead the very place in which history and self converge into a complicated and complicit consciousness. The personal wound embraces the general one, as the singular heart contains, impossibly, paradoxically, the universal one. I have seldom read poems of such heart, such envisioned heart. What fills it isn’t simply blood, nor simply blood spilt—that history that is our current moment too. It is bird-song and bullet simultaneous. It is the poet’s mouth that opens and is at once both lament and praise, offering back to the world—and so to us—the experience of itself, of ourselves in it. Tichy’s poetry is affirming in just this sense (it might not feel like affirmation): it says I am here, living in what I live through, and if I am, then so are you. This harsh inclusion, it is the necessary one.” —Dan Beachy-Quick