Poets and Poems: Forrest Gander and "Mojave Ghost"

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. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

John Niehardt’s Epic ‘Cycle of the West’ – video by Andrew Bensn Brown at Society of Classical Poets.

 

The Draft Horse – poem by Robert Frost at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

“The Touch of the Masters Hand,” poem by Myra Brooks Welch – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“Epic,” poem by Patrick Kavanaugh – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

The 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: “Be With” by Forrest Gander

The 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to the collection Be With by Forrest Gander. It’s one of the most unusual collections of poetry I’ve ever encountered; I’ve read it three times now and each time it seems a different book.

Be With is a collection of different kinds and forms of poetry. Itis less a collection of poems than it is meditations upon the personal and the intimate, even when it talks about things that’s aren’t personal or intimate. It is a collection of poetry that is about the beauty of language, and how beauty and language can be used to describe and evoke profoundly deep feelings.

The collection officially contains 18 poems. Many of those poems are themselves collections of poems that could easily stand on their own. But grouped together, they become poems telling stories – of caring for an aging mother, of chasing personal demons, of a love relationship, of a border crossing (mostly illegal), and of interpreting a series of black-and-white photographs. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.