{"id":10448,"date":"2019-05-08T16:02:18","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T15:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10448"},"modified":"2019-05-08T16:12:30","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T15:12:30","slug":"forrest-gander-be-with-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10448","title":{"rendered":"Forrest Gander | <em>Be With<\/em> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Forrest Gander | <em>Be With<\/em> | New Directions: $16.95<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i67.tinypic.com\/348oneb.jpg\" width=\"220\" align=\"left\" style=\"margin-right: 10px\"><\/p>\n<p>On the back of Forrest Gander\u2019s new collection, the <em>Washington Post<\/em> is quoted with the comment, \u2018A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty.\u2019  It clearly takes a certain level of honesty to place such an ambivalent comment as part of a blurb.  But there is a heartfelt honesty about Gander\u2019s formal range: from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E oriented approaches where Gander\u2019s attitude to subject matter is cool, to say the least, to the very intimate portrayals of his relationship with his mother, dying of Alzheimers.  In between, there is a powerful eco-poetry that is driven by both close observation of things, and visual poetry that Apollinaire would have recognised.  This formal restlessness sets Gander apart from other L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets because it is clear that Gander feels an absolute need to \u2018say things\u2019, and an absolute need to find the right form for the utterance. <\/p>\n<p>This need to \u2018say things\u2019 in Gander\u2019s writing reaches its apogee in \u2018Ruth\u2019, Gander\u2019s sequence about his mother in the final throes of Alzheimer\u2019s. Here, Gander\u2019s language is closest to the lyric.  Not only is it clear that the \u2018I\u2019 in the poem is the empirical Forrest Gander, but the language itself is never afraid to use metaphor and simile.  Thus, this lyricism allows the sequence to \u2018be\u2019 with Gander\u2019s mother.  The poetry is also unafraid to be \u2018poetic\u2019 in response to the difficulty Gander\u2019s mother has in her declining ability to communicate. Such poetry supports the reader in the emotion which such a decline evokes in both the writer and the reader;  as in this extract, \u2018Choose whatever \/ you will and the disease \/ still wins. Like a heavy shawl, \/ the shadow of cloud drags across \/ mountains on the horizon.\u2019 That Gander puts the disease\u2019s winning on the same line as a metaphor for cloud clearly connects the two; the disease and the heavy shawl reflecting and refracting one upon the other to deepen each. A deepening which is almost the <u>object<\/u> of lyric poetry.  And it is a testament to Gander\u2019s technique that, firstly, he does this with such aplomb, but also, secondly, that it is so achieved.<\/p>\n<p>Part of this achievement, then, is Gander\u2019s sense of how form emerges from content.  In the long poem, \u2018Evaporaci\u00f3n: A Border History\u2019 and the final sequence, \u2018Littoral Zone\u2019, Gander\u2019s language becomes both more pared down, and, to some extent, more formal.  This, from \u2018Evaporaci\u00f3n: A Border History\u2019, \u2018Paisanos they call \/ road runners, brothers of the land. A dozen \/ Mexican corpses marooned under desert sun.\/ In cottonwoods by the river, \/ zone-tailed hawks squeal. Visible \/ desde el aire, the craquelure of \/ an abandoned runway \/ overlies \/ toxic waste and unexploded munitions.\u2019 I have to apologize to Forrest Gander for not laying out the stepped arrangement of the lines on the page.  But we can see here how the writing is clipped and abrupt.  Sentences have no main verbs and the only two uses of metaphor are in the comment \u2018brothers of the land\u2019 and in the word \u2018craquelure\u2019.  In this poem, Gander accumulates detail and places it in unadorned layers across the page.  The result is brutally effective;  at one and the same time we have the road runners as a symbol of life, juxtaposed with the corpses \u2018marooned under desert sun.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>The final sequence in the book, \u2018Littoral Zone\u2019 pays even more attention to the notion of a \u2018formal\u2019 language.  It begins with a prose paragraph, <\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Whether the blackness is interior \u2013 pelagic &#038; vegetal there, organic &#038; intestinal there &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\u2013 or mere background for such shapeliness of globes: spangled with lampyrid glow, &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;airy with striate foliation, and nowhere stricked-off level.<\/p>\n<p>The British reader is reminded, here, of J. H. Prynne\u2019s writing, the exotic, technical language exactly placed, the sense of a precisely visualized scene, both present and also seen slightly out of the corner of one\u2019s layman\u2019s eye.  Gander is perhaps different to Prynne in that the title of the sequence, the fact that its sections are named alternately, \u2018Entrance\u2019 and \u2018Exit\u2019, and the black and white photographs which accompany the poems, all point towards a closely particularised trajectory for the sequence. The poem describes a particular geological formation and the exploration of it. And an explanation for that exploration might be contained in the second \u2018Exit\u2019 section, \u2018<em>If a mountain lion could speak, who wouldn\u2019t understand her? On the path, yellow jackets and Painted Ladies alight were a seep darkens loam. A gleam on the slickensides. Sanctified stone<\/em>.\u2019 The technical language of the earlier section now gives way to the presence of life in the environment.  The technical description supplies a formal and an empirical context for the living eco-system.  That eco-system and its members \u2013 the mountain lion, yellow jackets and Painted Ladies &#8211; are described in ways which embed them in the environment.  There is a danger, of course, that embedding in the ways that Gander does here, by giving the mountain lion a voice, for example, sentimentalises the animals. But Gander\u2019s version of eco-poetry avoids sentimentality by the sheer precision of the context. The end result of these variations of both content and technique is a book which feels full and robust. <\/p>\n<p><strong>by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forrest Gander | Be With | New Directions: $16.95 On the back of Forrest Gander\u2019s new collection, the Washington Post is quoted with the comment, \u2018A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty.\u2019 It clearly takes a certain level of honesty to place such an ambivalent comment as part of a blurb. 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