Science and Steepleflower: Poetry

by Forrest Gander

Science & Steepleflower is a breakthrough book for Forrest Gander, a poet whose richness of language and undaunted lyric passion land him in traditions running from Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Duncan and Michael Ondaatje. His poetry has been called "desperately beautiful" by Thom Gunn in Agni Review, and "original and fascinating" by John Ashbery. With poems in the leading journals of the day -- American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few -- Gander plumbs the erotic depths of human interaction with the land. The poems in Science & Steepleflower test this relationship with what Publisher's Weekly has called "an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality", bringing us to new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1998

About the author

Born in the Mojave Desert, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia and spent significant periods in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas before moving to Rhode Island. He holds degrees in literature and in geology, a subject that recurs in his writing and for which his work has been connected to ecological poetics.

Collaboration has been an important engagement for Gander who, over the years, has worked with artists such as Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Eiko & Koma, Lucas Foglia, Ashwini Bhat, Richard Hirsch & Michael Rogers. He also translates extensively and has edited several anthologies of contemporary poetry from Latin America, Spain, and Japan.

He writes across the genres. A recent project with the Chilean poet Raul Zurita is Pinholes in the Night Essential Poems from Latin America. Other titles by Gander include The Trace, a novel set on the border with Mexico; Fungus Skull Eye Wing Selected Poems of Alfonso D'Aquino, translations; and Redstart an Ecological Poetics, essays and poems written with John Kinsella. Gander's 2011 book of poems, Core Samples from the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful, melancholic collection of poems that positively reek of the South, it's like a sensual walk through humid, rotting Southern life.

"The / audacious / originality of the ordinary / sometimes suggests an opening, / and to enter is to hear the measure / not of nostalgia but nearness--that fetching / lack of doubt and perspective, a world / zoomed-in close / enough to count black ants / under dog-stunted spirea."

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to return to this collection several times to master the vocabulary in order to glimpse its deeper insights. I am glad I made the effort. Gander unlocks the beauty of language used by science to describe the earth and what inhabits it, mostly in southern, volcanic, or desert landscapes of America. In this rich vein of language, he reveals much about how we relate to our environment and each other. From one angle, it is a collection of awakening, whether to a day beside a beloved, to trees jostling for space around a lake, or to the degree of cruelty in the fur trade with indigenous people. It is an extraordinary collection, which one could read again and again and gain another revelation each time.

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

love love love the first section, confused but still enamored with the rest. gander leaps between the particular and the cosmic, the human and the geologic, traveling the distance between urine on hubcaps to crickets under a well cover to spiral star clusters in a matter of words. it brings to mind assemblages, or perhaps more accurately a mobile, in which objects hung at great distances from one another nevertheless move on intersecting pathways.

favorites:
time and the hour
duration and simultaneity
to live without solace
the ceremony of opening the mouth and the eyes
face
a dissonance leading to a modulation
the history of a wobbling axis
deflection toward the relative minor
knife on a plate
garment of light

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the past few months, I have been taking a bi-monthly trip to Raven Used Books in Cambridge. I spend an hour or so pouring over the poetry section picking up volumes that look interesting. I avoid the stuff I'm most familiar with (unless it is Ted Hughes or Peter Richards), and choose books from poets I've never heard of.

This was one of the prizes from a recent trip - and I am very pleased it found it's way into my basket. Science & Steepleflower brims over with lush phrasing. It is easy to get tangled in the language in a way that is pleasingly exhausting.

The language carries you along the river of poems in this book. And like a river, you aren't stepping into the same poem twice. I added this to my re-read list.

[Bronwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Science and Steepleflower overflows with the tactile, the lush, the gritty, the extravagant: the indignity of senility, the window of a burning barn, “the land arborescing,” the public urinal, horseshoes clanging in the distance, “that gorgeous galena ore which is emotion.” Intimate wealth of landscape.

I often find it difficult not to skim just a little, but this book holds me to every word and its shape in both mouth and mind.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

heather sent this to me and i dunno if it was her comments on the text, or my mood that afternoon, but yeah, i found it sort of anti-woman. but then, i read an interview with the poet's wife and she said she was having a love affair with the book. i can understand, seeing the book manifest from manuscript to book form would be some sort of experience. but i dunno, maybe i need to take another read.

[Adam]

my favorite of his

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Field Guide to Southern Virginia!

[hh · Rating 5 out of 5]

yes. this.