Be With [Paperback]

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third sectiona moving transcription of Ganders efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimersrise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has beencalled one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.Ganders verses have a shattering, symphonic quality, but he uses poetry to locate and dislocate at once, pushing against the borders of meaning or pitching his camp where language estranges itself from sense.?There are dazzling fragments, unraveling syntax, poems that, in their ghostliness, also force us to be alert to our own fragile lives.Life, death, and every minor phenomenon in between feels more vivid in Ganders heartbreaking work.Utterly naked and bereft, elegies, apologies, could-have-beens, Gander grieves and wonders about what's left in his life.?Reading this book may hurt, but it will help people to keep living through what they thought they could never survive.If Ganders philosophical strain and flamboyant lingo suggest Wallace Stevens, and his conversance with science and his stress on the ongoing recall A. R. Ammons, he insinuates a knotty, digressive intensity that is fully his own.A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty.Ganders love for formal, even archaic language and the quiet complexity of his syntax can build striking abstract landscapes in which the material and spiritual worlds seem equally intelligent.Written in the wake of this loss,?Gander does not turn away from grief but dives into its awful and catharticl3œ