Chana Bloch and Tess Gallagher Read Tuesday at Albany Library

Tuesday, world-known writers and longtime friends bring an evening of poetry and translation to .

Each woman's work and life are rich in cross-cultural experiences, which infuses their poems in English and informs their sensitive translations of foreign poetry, making them accessible and true for English-speaking audiences.

Chana Bloch will read from her latest collection, Blood Honey, winner of the Poetry Society of America Di Castagnola Award, and from Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, which earned the Northern California Book Award for Translation and is now out in paperback.

Jane Hirshfield writes that Bloch's poems "eat, dress, make love, ponder, remember, mourn, and observe. They know ... things about life that are hard to put into words." Critic Jake Marmer adds that, as Bloch delves into her Ashkanazi Jewish heritage, "mischievously irreverent and tender," she at times locates "a poem's elusive meaning ... between real-life situations and biblical image."

Bloch's other book publications include The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing and Mrs. Dumpty. Her co-translations include the biblical Song of Songs, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and Amichai's Open Closed Open, winner of a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Many of Bloch's poems and translations have been set to music. Composer David Del Tredici selected and arranged several of Bloch's poems into the song cycle Chana's Story, which premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The Song of Songs was performed in Jorge Liderman's cantata by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus. Composers Bruce Adolphe, David Fulmer and D'Arcy Reynolds all have set her work to music. Bloch's Song of Songs was performed also in a staged version by A Travelling Jewish Theater..

For more than 30 years, Bloch taught and directed the Creative Writing Program at the Mills College Department of English. She is now Professor Emerita at Mills. She also serves as poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over 60.

Tess Gallagher is currently introducing West Coast audiences to her new book, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems. Midnight Lantern collects 40 years of poetry, along with new poems, many of which are inspired by Gallagher's second home, in County Sligo of western Ireland (she also lives in her hometown of Port Angeles, WA).

Joyce Carol Oates has commented that "it is impossible to read Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of their intense...unforced images." This praise most definitely applies to Gallagher's newest collection as well.

In keeping with the evening's theme, Gallagher will also read from her just-published translation of poetry by Liliana Ursu, a collaboration with Ursu and the English translator Adam J. Sorkin, titled A Path to the Sea.

Along with seven previous volumes of poetry, including Moon Crossing Bridge, My Black Horse, Dear Ghosts and Amplitude, Gallagher has written countless essays about poetry--from A concert of Tenses to her preface for Beyond Forgetting, an anthology of poems about Alzheimer's. Gallagher's fiction includes The Lover of Horses and Other Stories, At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Man from Kenvara: Selected Stories.

Gallagher's Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray is the memoir of a partnership in love and in artistic endeavor. As literary executor of Raymond Carver's estate, Gallagher wrote introductions to works posthumously published.

Perhaps most famously, she worked with Robert Altman on the 1993 film Short Cuts, which was based on nine of Carver's short stories. She also spearheaded publication of Carver's complete and original works.

Two of Gallagher's more recent projects test the boundaries between the literary arts. In Distant Rain Gallagher records her conversations with the Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun Jakucho Setouchi. And, in Ireland, she has written down tales from the oral Irish tradition as presented by storyteller Josie Gray. In a collaboration entertainingly quirky and wise, Gallagher and Gray published this collection of tales in Belfast as Barnacle Soup--Stories from the West of Ireland.

Bloch and Gallagher will finish their reading by discussing the art of collaboration and the poet as translator. The reading will be followed, as always, by Albany's traditional open mic.

Poetry at the Albany Library
2nd Tuesdays Featured Writers and Open Mic  
Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011, 7 to 9 p.m.