Mojave Ghost by Forrest Gander

New Directions

Review by Laura Mullen

If “The personal is the political” was a truism and rallying cry of second wave feminism (invoked also by student and civil rights activists), the slogan for whatever wave we’re surfing now could be “The personal is the planetary.” That more expansive and inclusive perspective, however, has been available in poetry for some time—indeed we could say that the so-called “Nature poets” (a term that emerges as nature becomes imperiled) were early adopters of this understanding. Poetry—perhaps because of its interest in both imagery and the material aspects of language—has always leaned into embodiment, foregrounding the ways in which we are part of the world we want to know. And, from Wordsworth to Harryette Mullen, there’s been an often tested awareness of the way in which moving under our own power at our own pace through a landscape, describing what we see, can offer a clearer vision of both where we are, and who. “Perhaps,” as Wallace Steven writes (in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”),

The truth depends upon a walk around a lake,


A composing as the body tires, a stop

To see hepatica, a stop to watch

A definition growing certain and


A wait within that certainty, a rest

In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.

Stevens’ lines could work as an introduction to the poet Forrest Gander’s most recent collection, Mojave Ghost. Billed as “A Verse Novel,” this collection of poems written—so the opening notes tells us—while the author was hiking the San Andreas Fault, fits perfectly into the framework of “a composing as the body tires.” Writing en plein air (as the painters say), Gander’s long lyric sequence moves forward and also halts “to watch” and “wait”: patiently testing certainties within the environment’s truth. While Gander’s trajectory is through a desert, and the “swags” here are endangered Joshua Trees, his pilgrimage (surely the correct term for a walk toward truth) is in the tradition Stevens inherited.

Gander, however, knows more about the world he’s walking in than Stevens ever seemed to think he needed to, and that gives his encounters with nature a rich depth. Closer to the writing of C.S. Giscombe, in Mojave Ghost Gander’s composing hikes have their resonant origin in family history: the poet was born in this desert, and his mother’s “long walks” in this particular landscape were formative, leading him to take a degree in earth science and to work as a geologist, “the profession,” he tells us “it has been said, of those given to disinter memory.” But while Gander’s always been astonishingly informed about, as well as alert and vividly alive to, the world around us, in previous books he seemed, often, to be observing physical realities from some safe distance. In Mohave Ghost that distance seems to be—happily and necessarily—collapsing. Subject and object are confounded, where, by his own confession, the poet is literally nourished by place: “The first dirt I ever tasted,” he tells us, in the book’s opening sentence, “was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert.”

That sentence is worth a whole essay—so much of what’s amazing and admirable about this poet’s work is manifest or shimmering there. But, briefly, Gander, who opened his novel As a Friend (2008) with an unforgettably graphic description of childbirth, isn’t afraid to start a poetry collection with the picture of himself eating dirt—and can’t you, “fistful,” see it, as well as, “siltstone dust” (!) taste? But if we’re imagining the baby the poet was once—one small filthy fist smearing saliva-dense earth across fat cheeks—it’s crucial to note that Gander does not say, “when I was a child…” That refusal to draw a line between, or put a seatbelt on for the crash of, past and present is absolutely key to the work of this book, where the collapse of the distinctions between the selves he has been at various times in his life is the point. Sure, putting the world into our drooling, languageless, mouths is the first epistemology, but—in what becomes a sensual initiation for the older poet—that symbolic, transgressive (we are not supposed to eat dirt, right?) gesture is reenacted:

“...you bent and touched your finger to the warm, ant-fenestrated dirt

...

and then you stood and brought it, your finger,

to my lips, you said here, and you watched me

as the taste, part you part earth, brought a change to my face.”

Though this poet is anything but didactic, one subtle and seductive lesson of Gander’s book, vivid in image and gesture, might be this: we are—always—”part earth.”

Another lesson? We cannot erect or protect borders in time or history: we are all the people we ever have been. Starting, in the opening poem, by quoting himself (or a man, for the third person is deployed effectively and intermittently throughout this collection) insisting that “There is nothing in me now / of what I was before,” the poet goes on to demonstrate, over and over, the falseness of that kind of willful denial of the self’s complexity and the world’s gorgeous messiness:

“When we find our lives

Disagreeable to look at, we say

I am not that any longer.

...


But what bird has woven spring of lavender, mint, yarrow,

And citronella into a nest below our rusted porch light?”

Woven of time the world around us, the self is a mixture, and past and present cannot be held apart, as grief for absent loved ones is involved in the birth of a new love (for this book is less “Verse Novel” than epithalamion). Where “To feel life course through you” is a goal, walls get in the way. By the end of Mojave Ghost, the poet’s distrust of the “distinctions / that separate me out” allows him to understand himself as “in and of” the landscape—surfacing a speaker to trust: one who has traced his roots and taken the earth’s stony truth into his mouth.  

The tenderness and vulnerability of this collection owes everything to that willingness to question and test false distinctions: border failure is at the heart of the book’s brilliance. On the level of form, we see a rejection of the usual rules and structures—the collection feels less like an experiment than a notebook—and, finished, the book holds some sense of still being in process. While Mojave Ghost has page numbers, it has no table of contents: aside from the “Coda” (“Rift Zone”) the free verse poems are untitled and only lightly separated from each other. A single asterisk at the top of each page marks the sections off, and while that small signal eases a shift in subject matter or mood, we can see that each now is connected to before and after. On the level of content, it’s worth noting that the epigraph is taken from one of the poet’s previous books, a breech of the boundary between present and past projects. And we can also see a laudable failure of boundaries in the inclusion of all those—wonderful—lines, remarks, and flashes of energetic wit credited to the poet’s hiking companion and love. Both “muse” and reality check, the poet’s wife, visual artist Ashwini Bhat, is so present here the book might almost be considered a collaboration (and indeed the couple does, as the endnotes make clear, frequently collaborate). If Dante could have collapsed his Beatrice into his Virgil we might have heard dialogue this lively and wise: “You are the love of my life. / No. You are the love of your life.” Gander doesn’t hide the fact of being, “…seduced by an intelligence that outleaps his own,” or—as another, unlocated voice claims—“purely titty-smacked!” Nakedly honest about his debt and dependence, the poet confesses (more than once), “Only in your company do I / concentrate and hold together…” Part earth, we are also part other, which brings us back to the book’s fluidly shifting pronouns. Sometimes first person, sometimes third, pivoting mostly around a specific beloved second person (“you”) but sometimes deploying the general “you” (Americans prefer to the British “one”) the poet keeps adjusting the focus, so that we can never entirely forget that what we see is in some part a matter of how we look and from what distance.

Charmingly restless and inquisitive about the self, the other, the world we live in and the entangled interdependence of all of the above, Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost is a book to read and reread. You’ll want to return to it for the ways it loosens narrative, for its many voices / perspectives, for its open form, and for the immersion in the warm affection between the speaker and his wife—as well as for the gorgeous and crystal-clear images which are a hallmark of this poet’s work. And to read it again for the grounded wisdom, life-tested and uneasy: “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.” Though the book is in no way part of what a friend calls “the project of uplift” (poetry which, teaching us to lie to our children and ourselves, can be shelved in the the self help section), Mojave Ghost can encourage us as we face the ongoing observable changes in our persons and the planet: “At peace means despair / has settled in place.