Forrest Gander merges interior with exterior to discover meaning.
In 2021, five years after the death of his wife, poet C.D. Wright, poet Forrest Gander began to walk sections of the San Andreas Fault from north to south. Accompanied by a recent immigrant, Ashwini Bhat, he eventually found himself in Barstow, California, where he’d been born. It was more than a hometown; he describes how his mother’s enthusiasm for the washes and canyons of Rainbow Basin led in an almost direct line to his own interest in geology (and a degree and a career before poetry).
That early experience and his own background in geology led to an intense interest in landscape, an interest reflected across many if not most of his writings. And it’s fully reflected in Mojave Ghost: A Novel Poem (2024). The ghost of the title, he says, refers to his mother; he can’t help seeing the landscape of the Mojave Desert through his mother’s eyes.
The poems are, however, more than descriptions of landscapes. What Gander has done in this work is to merge the physical landscape with his own interior landscape of loss, memory, and discovery of a new relationship. Readers should take the subtitle, A Novel Poem, seriously; this is not a collection of individual poems. Instead, Mojave Ghost is a 76-page poem (with breaks denoted by asterisks) that tells a story about the physical and personal landscapes.
It is a story about a man’s life as currently lived in a beautiful if stark world. Just as this physical landscape surprises in its color and textures, it provides a mirror into the color and textures of Gander’s life and mind. The story often surprises in its frankness and candor, but then, that fits the often unforgiving terrain of the desert.
This is a part of the story he tells:
So what if worlds are boundless? I caught
myself filling with the nonreturnable
particularity of this one afternoon. Squatting
and listening to a desert marigold bloom.
When the hum of an invisible plane
made me suddenly aware of the sprawling
underflow of stillness around me,
it was not loneliness I felt, but
some nevertheless of enchantment.
Those constant bearers of meaning
bore me. I want to open wide now
to the absence of concept, understanding,
representation, to the inward flare
of exhilaration. To the gratuitous
revelation of mineral forces, Isn’t the
materiality of this Joshua tree, its living
presence, more than what it means?
Forrest Gander
Gander has published numerous poetry collections, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics; Science & Steepleflower; and Be With, which was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His Core Samples from the World, a collection of poems, essays, and photography, was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He’s also published novels, essays, and poetry translations and anthologies. A trained geologist, he holds degrees in both geology and English literature. His fellowships include National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard foundations. He served as the Briggs-Copelan poet at Harvard and was a professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University.
I found Mojave Ghost to be one of the most riveting works of poetry I’ve read. At times shocking, it can also be moving to the point of tears. It’s not confessional; it’s starkly autobiographical. And, yes, you can hear, smell, and feel the desert.
Photo by Mobilus in Mobili, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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