A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence

by Forrest Gander

A Faithful Existence is a thrilling, lyrical exploration of what it means to be faithful in the act of translation, in scientific and spiritual inquiry, in philosophies of perception, in friendship, and in poetry. Sensual, erudite, and operatic in scope, these essays pay homage to the landscape of the American South, to snapping turtles and anti-particles, to iconoclastic physicists and writers from various countries and epochs, to visionary poets and to poetic hoaxes.

Forrest Gander pops the hood of the standard-issue essay and hotwires it for the 21st century, re-tuning compelling associations and vivid bursts of insight into the quality of immediate experience. He connects with an ethical vision, a bodily consciousness, and a mode of language that might help us to survive the streams of data, the discombobulating media, and the predatory march of “information” that defines our age.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 21, 2005

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

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Gander also published this earlier collection of essays, thought pieces and creative discussions on poets, poetry and translation. The prose, the insights and the range of reading are masterful. Elegant precise poets I hadn't heard of come alive in these pages. The commitment to art is forceful, like what holds nuclear material in atoms together.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erudite and complicated, this book of meditations is delightfully obscure---most people won't have patience for Gander's reflections, but those who do will be rewarded. I've been forcing students to read from it for a couple years, and their reactions range from respect/awe to hatred/insults; I think of it, regarding either of those responses, as good medicine for the potentially afflicted.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only scanned a few essays, the rest I read with undivided interest. I definitely learned a bit more on the art of translation and also had a few revelatory moments that helped underscore my fascination with geopoetry. He is not the only geologist turned poet that I know.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And evolution is contingent in nature. We are here by chance. John Ashbery: It could always have been written differently. Or, as the poet Basil Bunting put it succinctly: Man is not end product, maggot asserts."