[Tess Gallagher's poems in Under Stars are] personal lyrics, done with a verbal finesse rare to find these days in the common American free-form convention. I am tempted to call it feminine. And I do, risking the era's awkward consequences, because there is after all a womanly sensibility in literature, thank heaven, and we can recognize it. Moreover, Gallagher's poems, beyond their delicacy of language, have a delicacy of perception that I, at any rate, associate with women; the capacity to see oneself objectively as another person doing the things one really does, but without the hard philosophical intrusions most men resort to; instead with clear affection and natural concern. If Jane Austen, in creating her characterizations, was often writing about herself, then Tess Gallagher, in writing about herself, is often creating characterizations, i.e., fictions, people existing in words, whom she cannot know, yet whom she regards...