[In Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, and On Your Own, Tess Gallagher] consistently reaches into fresh, often startling reservoirs of experience and comes up with original, lucid verses.

I am most impressed by the wide variety of subjects that Gallagher has investigated. "Two Stories" is about the murder of her uncle in 1972: it compares someone else's lurid account of the killing with her own perceptions…. In "Breasts," she dates the end of her childhood rapport with boys to the day her mother interrupted the children's roughhouse and demanded that the little girl cover her "swart nubbins." "A Poem in Translation" defines the additional violence that a translator does to a persecuted Russian poet. All the poems are written in single, distinctive voice, which, if uniformly humorless, is quiet enough to accommodate differing levels of tone and sharp enough to carry emotional urgency. One even hears this voice in the one poem in which Gallagher writes in the persona of her father…. The reader also hears it in her most difficult poems…. She is always successful in evoking her childhood. Here especially the images ring true and immediate…. Gallagher understands that the mind of a child works in ways that for want of a better word can be called poetic. (pp. 54-5)

Another group of poems concerns the poet's travels in Ireland where she was particularly aware of the situation of Irish women: in one poem, rich with the resonances of a folk ballad, several women recount their sorrows in that troubled country. Old loves are the subjects of several poems in the three books. With only the barest trace of sentimentality she can seize on the quickly observed exterior scene and ponder its inner significance; she can examine the impossibilities of a relationship with an obsessed war veteran; or she can discourse on those "Counterfeit Kisses" that do not deceive the one who accepts them. (p. 55)

Like all good poets from Homer to the present, Gallagher occasionally writes about creating poetry and about what can happen to the creators. Three poems in Instructions to the Double, including the title poem, are concerned with the occupation of the poet, and typically, all three approach the problem from quite different perspectives. The best of the set is "Instructions to the Double" in which the poet's self is split. "The double" is told to take the risks it must if it is to survive…. "Instructions to the Double" is a powerful piece of work, though it is more about poetry in general than about Gallagher's own poetry. What she has lived through—directly or vicariously—is not as important as her ability to invest thought with poetic vision. Few poets writing today are as successful at it as she. (p. 56)