Mojave Ghost

September 1, 2024

In his sonorous new collection, Pulitzer Prize winner Gander (Be With) captures his walk along parts of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault, ending at his Mojave desert birthplace. It's a journey fraught with recall, launched after the deaths of his wife, poet C.D. Wright ("marriage, a divination of resonant relations") and his mother ("I borrowed my brightness from her. Where is it now?"). If this collection shows how place and memory coalesce, it's also concerned with how we see ourselves. "My childhood self asks again, / What have you done with your life?" muses Gander, and throughout he regrets a loss of impetuous joy ("the inward flare / of exhilaration") and a tendency to overthink rather than experience ("But I was a jukebox. What came out of me was just / what other people wanted to hear"). Trained as a geologist, Gander converses not only with his past but all past, seeking to locate himself in deep geologic history as he notes the "pale fossils ... after the rain" and "rock-flavored afternoon heat." In the end, he continues to ask questions as he heads down the canyon into life. VERDICT A deeply engaging book of big poems that feels like a guide for self-reflection.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 19, 2024
The expansive and arresting latest from Pulitzer winner Gander (Be With) comprises what he calls a “novel poem,” a book-length single poem that spans time, space, and narrative perspective against stark and arresting desert environments. Roughly broken into page-long scenes, the poem asks, “Is there an emotion of awareness?” Working to transcend the constraints of narrative, the poet decenters himself within the landscapes he explores. “The goal was never knowledge, but attentiveness,” he writes, “those constant bearers of meaning/ bore me.” Gander shifts perspective between first and second person, addressing his beloved companion as both “you” and “she,” and reflects on the multifaceted nature of experience: “As my memories and the present mixed, as my tumultuous inner emotions and the landscape coalesced, I felt my sense of self become kaleidoscopic.” A geologist by training, Gander sketches the natural world in ways that are strange and, at times, startlingly precise. In one poem, he describes “walking along/ into the faintly semen-smell of the middle of the night.” The eye of a just-slaughtered cow is “nicotine Saturn,” and “the spring hills boing green.” Readers will be wowed.