Forrest GanderBesprekingen

I liked the background and the ideas; and many of the essay portions. The poetry didn't connect for me.

"Twice Alive" refers to both lichens, which appear throughout this book, and a strong human couple. I think anyway, as usual with poetry I am not 100% sure what the author intended, but that is what I got out of this.

Most of these poems are commentary on nature--post-fire Marin County, a redwood forest, oak trees, scrub and stellar jays, crows harassing a hawk. People do appear--usually a couple, in nature. Surfing in Bolinas, walking in the woods.

I enjoyed this, I know these landscapes so can easily picture them based on Gander's descriptions, and his word choice is wonderful.

Apparently this book is based on? Is? Sangam poetry from the Tamil tradition, and there is a short essay by N. Manu Chakravarthy who is a professor in Bengaluru. I did not much understand this essay, as I have no background.

Favorite poem: Wasteland (for Santa Rosa)

I especially loved the long poem, "Mission Thief."

This was a bit of a mediocre collection for me. None of the poems really stand out, and I don't think I'll remember any of it in a year's time. I wasn't fond of the way a lot of the poems' lines were broken up because it cut off the flow, but I did like the mixing of English and Spanish throughout the collection. Full review to follow.

A wonderful award winning collection of poetry. It is great from start to finish. A couple I really loved were "Ruth" and "Madonna del Parto" . Madonna is a short work that paints a beautiful visual image of a waterfall and its surroundings. Ruth is a homage to the author's mother in her waning years and tugs at the heart. I really loved the collection and can see why it received all the acclaim that it has. Loved it.

Poetry can be blunt and come right at you, or, at other times, a poet can say so much by what isn't stated word by word. I am new to Forrest Gander, but I was richly rewarded for dipping my eyes into these poems. The syntax is varied and quite clever at times, one doesn't simply plod along line after line. A poem might curve down the page with outliers off to the side, or lines might hold a first few words that are split off by a space from the line's completion, or there might be a page full of single line stanzas, or a poem may go on for pages that are made up of short stanzas that dot a page here and there. All the styles work in their own way and offer up words that connect.
My one negative note would have to do with the last section of the book titled "Littoral Zone." In those pages, six poems each face and concern a photo on the opposite page. To each poem, my connection was nil, even after several readings ... maybe another time.
Throughout the book the variety of form was as agile as the language used to express the message. Many times I am a lazy reader of poetry, I don't want to have to work too hard to find the meaning, and obscure references seem tiresome and I leave them obscure and undiscovered. These poems need and deserve attention. You don't need a reference source for ancient gods, or need to know the life histories of famous poets, you just owe it to yourself to pay attention to what is both said and unsaid, by what is spelled out in solid words, and what is just peeking out from behind a phrase here or there.
Grief runs through many of the poems, as the poet has lost not only his mother, but also his partner of thirty years, the poet C.D. Wright in 2016. Wright died unexpectedly in her sleep, which throws a horrid scenario of discovery into my mind. My sensitivity to grief is still very high from losing my own partner of thirty years six months ago. I see shadows of that pain quickly in these poems. A poet uses words in so many different ways to make us share a feeling, a raw emotion, a longing for a person, or a time, or both. I was deeply touched by some of these poems. When a complete stranger's words can reach off the page and touch your heart so intimately and so intensely, it's a thing of beauty.½

This is another selection from the NBA longlist for poetry. The poems about him caring for his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, are emotional and touching. Other poems in the collection looking at the natural world are more cerebral. He focuses on the area near the US/Mexico border and uses imagery effectively to capture time and place.

The book is organized as 4 series of three poems/writings. The first of each group is an "Evaporation" poem, lineated, dedicated & lyrical. Intimate. There is always a "she."
The second piece in each series is a photo essay-poem, a collaboration with a photographer & the black & white photos are almost uniformly stellar. These are in various poetic forms. Non specific locations or not AS specific as the locales in the third section of each group. These poems are "revealed always in situation." These poems are built upon repetitions, which create an incantatory, hallucinatory effect. The least effective of these photo/essay pieces is, to my mind, the last, "Lovegreen," with photos by Raymond Meeks. Unlike earlier pieces, this poem seems written to the images, as if the images must precede the words, rather than form in conjunction with them.
Even so, there are word pictures that do not describe photos (there is no boy in the photos)as well as photos that aren't doubled in words (like the jars filled with pond creatures, both innocent play & shadow of lab-filled jars of formaldehyde-preserved amphibians) & we can't see the birds that are purportedly captured on film. They may be in the photos, but we can't find them out.
The third selection in each series is in haibun form, a prose poem (or simply prose) interjected with what appear to be three line haikus (on closer inspection, however, these do not follow the traditional 5, 7, 5 syllabic form, but are of irregular & varying length). These prose pieces are accounts of a poet's journey, specific journeys to specific countries to participate in colloquiums of international poets, & the poet's journey into other cultures and languages through the work of translation. The countries/ cultures visited are those of China, Mexico, Bosnia & Chile. The final journey to Chile, like the preceding photo essay of Part 4, is different than those of the first three sections. Here the poet travels solo. He seems more isolated, less integrated into the foreign place. The poets he is among remain absent: Nicanor Parra doesn't meet with him when he goes to the poet's house & when Parra drives into town to see him, Gander isn't at his hotel. So the meeting is aborted. He visits Neruda's house, but Neruda is dead. The vigil must be constant for the icon to appear, for the icon to accept the invitation. This, unlike earlier journey poems, is about NOT making connection, of feeling the full strangeness of one's outsider situation. Ultimately, however, "at last he's in rhythm with the local" but this integration in the here and now, self in other, feels unstable & contingent. For this moment, but perhaps not for tomorrow.
His estrangement is somewhat mitigated, but in a universal, cosmic rather than particular sense (despite claims of integration in the local). He hasn't really connected with anyone in this place.

The structure of the book recapitulates the breadth & variety of Gander's oeuvre in general. His lyrical, related but stand-alone poems, his extensive work as a translator, especially of Mexican poets, but also his forays into Japanese (winked at so to speak here by use of the tweaked haibun form), & his works of collaboration with photographers. These last works veer toward document & witness. They have a social & ecological component.

Stunning reenactment in poetry of a 6 hour long movement performance. Gander's language is both lush & spare, "experimental," yet accessibly grounded visually & emotionally. Better than being there (and shorter!).

I like the idea of writing from a place or about a place as opposed to a landscape (which always seems to reference the I as subject-focal point, the landscape as object or field for the I's emotions, aesthetics, etc). Ecopoetics seems to acknowledge place & the species that inhabit that place as subjects entire onto themselves. "Nature" is the word coined to refer to all that isn't human, setting the human species apart. It's currently popular to insist that humans are part of nature, although that is by definition not possible. I think Gander & Kinsella come closer to describing a working relationship between our species & the rest of what constitutes the world we inhabit. Their argument is complex, however, & I haven't as yet completely absorbed it. I enjoyed the back and forth of the poetry, two poets writing from very different locations (Kinsella-Australia; Gander-various American locations). I perhaps appreciated the essays even more.

It's not surprising tha Jeannette Winterson likes this (NYT book review). It has short sections, many just one sentence long, which are often bursts of emotion or violently condensed images. Like Winterson, Gander is content to compromise narrative drive in order to insert poetic images. "As a Friend" is, in effect, a novella interlarded with fragments of late twentieth-century American poetry. It's mainly very effective. I had two reservations:

1. The book is divided into four narratives. Their affective power increases from the first to the third, which is a lyric about despair, and the heart of the book to that point. The narrator of the fourth section ruined the lives of the narrators of the second and third sections. But in the fourth section, where the character responsible for the others' despair is finally given a voice, it becomes difficult to pay attention. The excerpts of that character's thoughts can only serve as condemnations of pretense and artifice -- but readers who have responded appropriately to the second and third sections don't need to be persuaded of such things. It would be devastating if the person who wrecked the lives of the other characters turned out to be genuinely inspired or otherwise profound, but no matter how much he talks about himself, art, love, and friendship -- even if that fourth section had been hundreds of pages long -- it isn't persuasive, shocking, or even interesting.

2. Many of Gander's images are typical North American lyric moments: large cricket-like creatures swarm from a cave; a dead shrew wriggles from the activity of the beetles burrowing in its body; a moth is cut in half by a machete. The squashed bugs, moments of sudden disgust, piles of shit or vomit (at least six in the book), are supposed to function as compressed, partly unreadable epiphanies: but they are a such a common device that they read more like placeholders for more appropriate metaphors -- images that might resonate with the surrounding narrative.½

I had the pleasure of hearing Forrest Gander read from this book and his other works. I find his poetry to be ecclectic with deep meanings an innuendos. He is a well know translator and uses a lot of his Spanish Latin America background so much has a south western flair. Other reviews have described his poetry as "experimental" and I would have to agree. If you are more of a non-traditionalist poetry fan then you will probably like this book.