In a Landscape

by John Gallaher

Falling somewhere between a "diary-poem," a "daybook," "autobiography-in-verse," and an "essay-poem," In a Landscape is noted poet and critic John Gallaher's most personal, straightforward, and revealing book yet. In lyric-prose that continuously circles the questions it raises, Gallaher sloughs off the garb of "poet" to address life questions in a way that few poets of his generation have been willing to risk. Family, death, adoption, children, parents, high school, music . . . Gallaher's subjects carry weight because of their absolute commonness. John Gallaher is assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, and co-editor of the Laurel Review .

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 2014

Reviews

[Simeon Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Gallaher’s In a Landscape is only 120 pages, but it's the biggest book of poems I’ve ever read. In sprawling but meticulous lines, Gallaher constructs a Socratic interrogation to end all interrogations, to humanize this problem with the abstract nouns that we all struggle with in our lives: how to love without plagiarizing, how to hate without being dishonest, how to work without being co-opted... how to fake all of the above just enough in order to believe in them.

Like a serious medieval monk being deeply unserious in the margins, Gallaher makes the Big Questions of how to exist in time while dying continuously and caring about everything and nothing intelligible, crafting little rhetorical homunculi who drag our errors off the page, smirking and crying and knowing their purpose is to end.

Gallaher redefines self-disclosure, giving in to neither the boring pornography of biography’s pathos nor the exhaustive, daily trivia of the writer showing his work. In a Landscape is honest, fine-grained, inventive, and deeply felt, scooping up a double handful of cognitive quicksilver from the mirror and offering it to us simply and slyly, without cheapening the reflections we find there.

[Victoria Chang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of poems/mini essays. John Gallaher's appeal to me is his mind and the brilliance of his observations. Sometimes he says what I have thought but didn't know it, other times he says things that I had never thought of, but all of his thoughts are genius, insightful, funny, and oftentimes strange. He observes daily life with such sharpness and approaches existential issues from all angles, panning up and down, back and forth, in and out, all with surprising moves and an intellect completely unmatched.

[Carmelo Valone · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetry insode of 'In a Landscape' is that of the everyday basics, monumental thoughts and actions. Throw in a little bit of Plato and some other great thinkers and you get this rather original memoir and poetry chapbook hybrid of memory, ideas and somehow the 'unspoken.'

If I wasn't vague enough, sorry about that, sometimes the use of words does not work for reviewing books of poetry-more so feelings and ideas about ideas are more ideal.

And after that's been said and done-I will shut up.

[Haines Eason · Rating 3 out of 5]

John is a friend now in reality, as I read this in preparation for an interview with him, but if you read this book and never meet him, you too might feel he is your friend ... and that you met him somewhere out there ... in reality. John is a wondrous, wandering soul, and his love of life and all its twisting ways is apparent here. This poem (it is one poem) is long for my taste, but that's not a fault of his, or mine, or of anyone, really, so I hope you read this poem, and I hope you enjoy it.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 2 out of 5]

While In a Landscape has strong moments, this poem doesn’t resonate with me beyond sections where Gallaher provides us glimpses into his personal life. The rambling never feels playful. The philosophy doesn’t feel that radical. The archive Gallaher seems to invoke in his lyrics feels white, Western, limited in scope. I wanted to like this, but I don’t think I’m the target audience for this rather lengthy poem.