On Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander’s​ first collection of poems appeared in 1988. He grew up in Virginia and his early work seemed like that of an elegant regionalist. With cut-glass concision, he often took a long look at earth, rocks, landscapes. ‘If not a writer, then I would probably be a geologist,’ he said in 2005. He planned to study palaeontology, but was diagnosed with melanoma in his twenties and decided, on his recovery, to pursue poetry instead. The early Gander also showed skill (he still does) in depicting erotic devotion and happy, awkward bodies in bed: ‘the wax in your ear tastes/bitter until I suck your tongue’; ‘lengths of/limbs in limbo on/the furrowed sheets’. And he knew how to frame the sounds of the rural South, as in ‘Sheriff Billy Willet’s/drunken, uphill, lisped soliloquy’.

Gander, who has now published twenty books, gradually extended his ambitions. He wrote longer-lined poems about photographs (some in collaboration with artists such as Sally Mann). He assembled poems about married love, alongside his partner (and colleague at Brown) the poet C.D. Wright. He delved further into geology, especially in the aptly titled Science & Steepleflower (1998). In 2008 he published As a Friend (2008), a novel or a roman à clef, linked to Wright’s early life. He also fashioned an astonishing sequence of unrhymed sonnets about raising their charismatic, headstrong son, Brecht. He won recognition for his translations of Spanish poetry into English: Mexico’s Coral Bracho and Pura López Colomé, Bolivia’s Jaime Saenz and, more recently, long lost poems by Pablo Neruda. He has also translated the work of Japanese poets such as Yoshimasu Gōzō and Shuri Kido.

Gander’s translations gave him a way to stand apart from Wright: in other literary matters they often seemed as inseparable as the Brownings. Wright’s sudden death in 2016, and the loss of Gander’s mother, informed the clipped, painful series of poems in Be With (2018), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Later Gander moved to California and married the sculptor and installation artist Ashwini Bhat. He published Knot, a book of verse responses to the photographer Jack Shear’s elegant male nudes, in 2022.

His most recent work is Mojave Ghost, a book-length poem – or a book-length set of untitled short poems – whose lines have a sharp and quasi-photographic accuracy (New Directions, £12.99). It’s a travelogue, a response to the bright, uneven landscapes of southern and south-eastern California, a narrated multi-day hike ‘past boulders/on the xeric canyon path’. It’s also an introspective work of mourning and memory, as well as a sex poem. (We find the poet restless in his sadness, then leave him with his beloved, still restless, but warm.) On a first reading, the poem seems to grow from and feed back into the landscapes it describes, clarifying ‘desert foothills’ alongside strips of the eastern and southern United States. Few poets see so much, so well, both in the shapes the lines make on the page, like the contours of canyons, and in sometimes shocking figurations: ‘clouds like lines of coke’; ‘fine bird-bone clouds/giving structure to the afternoon sky’. No place feels, in Gander’s work, like any other. ‘Back here’ – it must be Wright’s Arkansas – ‘he imagines her/everywhere he looks. As the spring hills boing green.’ Each remembered locale sends us in search of Gander’s ghosts, until the Mojave, returning, brings us back to the present, to ‘the gratuitous/revelation of mineral forces’.

Gander is precise in his descriptions of place: ‘Clusters of ramose fissures reticulate the plain’; ‘thirty feet from … where the arroyo realigns’. His double sense of time – that of the earth and that of the span of a human life – informs the poems as left and right eye inform the observer, presumably Bhat, who accompanies him on the hike: ‘Where is the place for them in/geologic time? She lifts binoculars/to her lined face.’ Lined with age; lined because Gander’s lines describe her. Watching her, he feels ‘like an insect blown by an updraft onto a mountain snowfield’. The canyon where they hike seems to Gander not only dry and sunlit but ‘thaumaturgic’, bringing back as if by magic the doubts and reassurances from his past.

Mojave Ghost includes sentences that shine with or without any kind of context: in one moment of sadness, ‘my small exuberances/hive in me like worms in a cadaver.//I’ll just sleep for a while/with these stones over my eyes.’ Gander’s sometimes terse attention to what he sees, his wish to make each segment stand independently, can cut pronouns and references clean away from the real life that they appear to describe: ‘Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.’ She meaning Wright? Most likely; but what to do, two pages later, with ‘The sum of what/ he knows of her is balanced/on what he doesn’t know?’ Wright? Bhat? Some third party? What about the spectacularly original erotic phrase: ‘her ass, like two cloves of garlic’? Who to envision here – and where? Part of the point is that the name of the person addressed doesn’t really matter. The poem becomes less autobiographical and more, as Gander once wrote about the poetry of George Oppen, ‘a collaboration with the world’: everything and everyone, in Gander’s psyche, speaks to everyone else.

A poet of toothsome words, trying for single lines as solid as rocks, Gander also knows how to describe the way emotions lead to other emotions: the way, for example, ‘happiness’ appears to come with ‘its own desire,/the desire to trill, to cling to us, to stay’. Yet the word ‘stay’, like all Gander’s favourite words, recurs and pivots, finding the dark underside of every light thing. ‘Who says you can’t stay fixed on the boat’s wake?’ Fascinated by shining ripples on water? Or obsessed by what’s now gone? The poet of Mojave Ghost has known both feelings.

Sometimes Gander’s concision seems gratuitous. Certain pages of the book contain just three lines: haiku-like framing, but also a lot of blank space without any apparent function or pay-off. He does better with one-line sentences arranged into longer processions, less an American Matsuo Bashō than an Americanised Hopkins, weaving bleakness amid the desert sun’s gleam: ‘I borrowed my brightness from her. Where is it now?’

Reread Mojave Ghost and it feels less like a travelogue than a writer’s diary or a collection of geological finds. How do all these sayings and seeings hold together? What connects, say, ‘the plinking and/ oscillating tympanum of the downpour’, with its conjoined verbal adjectives, its quick mimesis, to the iterative flatness of ‘My younger sister died today. My/father died today. My closest friend/died today. My mother died today’? How do these bits of Gander’s psyche make a whole, along with one another or with the landscapes he also describes? If the poem resembles – as it says – a lake, or a set of lakes, ‘what is it/swimming just under the surface?’

On the other hand: why does it matter? The poem becomes a self-portrait – this writer, in this place, holding these memories, at this time, alongside this lover. The animals he encounters, like the rocks, serve the interpersonal, and the scraps of story serve the way that Gander depicts his states of mind, now smitten, now flattened, now coming back to life, as ‘the future blows toward us without handholds.’ Erotic devotion, grief and rapt observation alternate and triangulate and recur, just as ‘the lake’s small waves/go on wringing themselves out in the sand.’ What lake? ‘Lake Echo’: perhaps Echo Lake, near Gander’s former house in Rhode Island, or Echo Lake in California’s Sierra Nevada: the only ‘Lake Echo’ in the United States is a body of water in central Florida. Looking it up won’t help: that’s the difference between reading, on the one hand, a book of biography or geology, and, on the other, this accretive, intermittently frustrating, startlingly experienced, wise and finally hopeful book.