Be With

by Forrest Gander

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 section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called 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.”

Genres: Poetry, Grief, Nonfiction, 21st Century, American, Adult, Contemporary

80 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 28, 2018

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

[Jeannie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't understand a lot of these poems, this is a book of poetry that I will need to read again. The poem dedicated to his mother with Alzheimer's made me cry, it made me think of my own mother.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the poems I understood, this was a 5 star collection. Especially "Ruth": a stunning poem about the poet's relationship with his mother who has Alzheimer's. But in general the poems used language brilliantly with breathtaking passages. Unfortunately, I didn't understand the last poem at all, although I liked the accompanying photographs. I tried looking up the words, but the sheer number I didn't know overwhelmed me and I finally gave up.

So I struggled between giving 4 stars (since I couldn't read the entire collection) and 5 (since it's probably my failing that I didn't understand some of the poems and the ones that I--more or less--did were wonderful. When in doubt, out of respect for the author, I round up.

And even if I didn't understand it all, it was time well spent and greatly rewarded.

[Bloodorange · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad, sparse, commanding attention and respect.

[Richard S · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first time I think I rated a book and wrote a review, and then went back and reread it more closely. And yes a second close read I found more to like. But still, with the exception of “Ruth” and a few others, the complete opacity of and the lack of capacity of any emotional or aesthetic attachment despite multiple attempts make these poems difficult to recommend. You see the Pulitzer Prize on this book and you think this must be the best contemporary poetry but to an average reader it’s the kind of book that would completely turn you off from proceeding further.

So not recommended to anyone, not even other poets, but 3 stars for the quality of some of the poems. Those looking for inspiration though have a lot of new poets to choose from (Limon, Seuss, Vuong).

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another selection from the NBA longlist for poetry. The poems about him caring for his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, are emotional and touching. Other poems in the collection looking at the natural world are more cerebral. He focuses on the area near the US/Mexico border and uses imagery effectively to capture time and place.

[Nicholas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing spoke. Mute & uninteresting. Disappointing.

[Caleb Ingegneri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything Gander says is tense, with the same knack for counterpoint of Palestrina. Throughout his sequence, the ice-shard sharpness of what he starts to say in one line crashes against the harsh, rising current and forms an iceberg of thought. Once you learn to read Be With "It means just / what it feels like / it means." What Gander says, like Knausgaard's My Struggle, fits the form it creates of itself.
"Saying, here is the untranslation of the world. /
Mounted on a spire of form. /
The disembarkation of abyss. Fragmentary sputtering."

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegiac, visceral, superbly lyrical, Forrest Gander's BE WITH is a balm, a vital read in trying times, which means all the time.

[Veronika · Rating 5 out of 5]

the top of my head is on fire

[Անահիտ Ղազախեցյան · Rating 2 out of 5]

Մի քիչ սպասելիքներ ունեի, բայց գոնե մի ամբողջական բանաստեղծություն չհավանեցի։ Հա, կային գտած, սիրուն հաստվածներ, բայց ափսոս ա դրա համար Պուլիցերյան մրցանակը:)

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit.

HOLY SHIT

[Terry Pitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gander’s newest book, Be With, 2018), is riddled with the “searing exquisite singularity” of death. In 2016, his wife, the poet C.D. Wright, died suddenly, and a number of the book’s poems deal with the “grief-sounds” and the “tetric silence” that he experienced after this loss. There is also a long, moving, deeply personal poem titled “Ruth,” about Gander’s aging, failing mother, who struggles physically and has memory issues. His response to familial grief is to write poems that are fractured and disjointed, that abruptly change direction, and have what he calls a “rhythm of farewell.”

For me, the most fascinating work in Be With is the closing poem sequence titled “Littoral Zone” in which Gander presents a combination of words and photographs in a new and more complex relationship than he has previously attempted. “Littoral Zone” has six parts, each consisting of a photograph by Michael Flomen on the left hand page and one section of Gander’s poem on the opposing page. Flomen’s black-and-white images are about as abstract as something can be that is still recognizable as a photograph. In fact, they are cameraless photograms that Flomen makes using only sheets of photographic paper, moonlight, and whatever he can find in forests or streams, including grass, branches, snow, rocks.

No matter how many times I read “Littoral Zone” it remains elusive and impossible to grasp as a whole. It’s a poem about the difficulty of knowing and the complex relationship between seeing and saying. I think the challenge he faced when confronted by the abstraction of Flomen’s photographs, knowing that they represent nature in its purest form, seems to have freed Gander. There is barely a hint of narrative to be found in Flomen’s stark images of light and darkness; therefore Gander’s poetic response could be, well, anything at all. And what he chose to do was go “optically active.” He riffs off Flomen’s images to create his own intimate landscapes and bodyscapes.

Read my longer review on my blog Vertigo.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

EPITAPH

To write You
existed me
would not be merely
a deaf translation.
For there is no
sequel to the passage when
I saw—as you would
never again
be revealed—you see me
as I would never
again be revealed.
Where I stand now
before the throne of
glory, the script
must remain hidden. Where,
but in the utterance itself?
Born halt and
blind, hooped-in by
obligations, aware
of the stare of
the animal inside, I
hide behind mixed
instrumentalities
as behind a square
of crocodile scute—
while cyanide drifts
from clouds to
the rivers. And in this
too might be seen
a figuration
of the human,
another intimately
lethal gesture of our
common existence.
Though I also wear
my life into death, the
ugliness I originate
outlives me.

MADONNA DEL PARTO

And then smelling it,
feeling it before
the sound even reaches
him, he kneels at
cliff’s edge and for the
first time, turns his
head toward the now
visible falls that
gush over a quarter
mile of uplifted sheet-
granite across the valley
and he pauses,
lowering his eyes
for a moment, unable
to withstand the
tranquility—vast, unencumbered,
terrifying, and primal. That
naked river
enthroned upon
the massif altar,
bowed cypresses
congregating on both
sides of sun-gleaming rock, a rip
in the fabric of the ongoing
forest from which rises—
as he tries to stand, tottering, half-
paralyzed—a shifting
rainbow volatilized by
ceaseless explosion.

[Matthew R. Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I enjoy reading poetry collections. This one wasn’t very long, containing only 18 poems, but I enjoyed it alot. I have never heard of this author, but found his poetry to be very good, and quite enjoyable. My favorite poem of this collection, “Ruth”, talked about his mother and how she went through dealing with dementia. I have a personal connection with that, my grandmother had dementia, and our family watched her battle and lose to it for over 10 years. I really enjoyed this collection of poems, finding several of them to be deeply moving, beautiful, and heartwarming. Great collection, and what a great poet!

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sad. "Son" is so good, but everything else is really just intellectualized semi-mediocrity. Much grief. Not much going on. A lot GRAND STATEMENTS. But Gander is not good enough to earn those big-boy grandiosities. Felt cheap and unaffecting.

SON
It's not the mirror that is draped, but
what remains unspoken between us. Why

say anything about death, inevitability, how
the body comes to deploy the myriad worm

as if it were a manageable concept not
searing exquisite singularity. To serve it up like

a eulogy or a tale of my or your own
suffering. Some kind of self-abasement.

And so we continue waking to a decapitated sun and trees
continue to irk me. The heart of charity

bears its own set of genomes. You lug a bacterial swarm
in the crook of your knee, and through my guts

writhe helminth parasites. Who was ever only themselves?
At Leptis Magna, when your mother & I were young, we came across

statues of gods with their faces and feet cracked off by vandals. But
for the row of guardian Medusa heads. No one so brave to deface those.

When she spoke, when your mother spoke, even the leashed
greyhound stood transfixed. I stood transfixed

I gave my life to strangers; I kept kept it from the ones I love.
Her one arterial child. It is just in you her blood runs.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...You find yourself in another world you weren't looking for where what you see is that you have always been the wolves at the door."

"You who were given a life, what did you make of it?"

Gander's got some interesting bits. Interesting pieces and poems. Building block on block, but in a medium other that blocks. Stacking a block tower out of whatever's at hand, and sometimes - oddly - going out of his way to acquire something that just doesn't make sense in a block tower: but there it is anyway.

He has a moment, in a poem - The Sounding - that feels so present. So what I thought the future would be.

..."situates you here
(here (here)) even while..."

It's in the context of a larger poem, of course. But if that isn't the feeling of zooming in, enlarging on a map of our mind - finger and thumb together/sliding apart to get here. Zoom. Here. Zoom. Here. All of the heres, of course being the same place, but all a much more specific same place.

"Have I lived
something stupid?
Am I the coward
responsible for
nothing?"

-from "Tell Them No"

[Miles Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection really is incredible and obviously deserving of the notoriety it received. I want to give it five stars because quite simply several of the poems included, "Ruth" especially, are among the best I've ever read. I'm not trained in poetry, so this is all an admitted amateur's opinion. Some of the filler poems left me wanting more. Still, its a great collection.

[V.S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best books i have read. it may be because of the mindset i am currently in, but it struck the best moments of melancholy, self-realization, self-loathing, & a hope to be better - but in all of that, knowing that at times progress seem to come as regression. the language, at times, was verging on "too scholarly" but then pulled back perfectly to be real. i am not sure if everyone would resonate with this style at a given time, but i devoured it in one day & think it's worth a shot for anyone. also, i have never written a review, so that also says something, i hope :)

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems were well-crafted, but there were only a couple that touched me emotionally. The rest used geographic and medical vocabulary that went above my head and weren't as memorable, to me at least.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

while cyanide drifts
from clouds to
the rivers. And in this
too might be seen
a figuration
of the human,
another intimately
lethal gesture of our
common existence.

Though I also wear
my life into death, the
ugliness I originate
outlives me.

—Epitaph, p15

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5* 3.75? A lot of this is just fine without proper context--I think? But either way... the section where the speaker interacts with their mother as they both navigate the waters of Alzheimer's... oof-the highlights here.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relentless high diction
lends itself to puzzles
of well-felt-out depth!

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it!

[Mery ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5

Pulitzer Prize Winner

[s moz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Intellectual" is perhaps the most efficient and fair way to describe it. Some may call it brutal and eclectic. Others, impenetrable. Intimacy is a personal thing, though.

[Sarah’s Shelves · Rating 3 out of 5]

“𝓨𝓸𝓾 𝔀𝓱𝓸 𝔀𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓰𝓲𝓿𝓮𝓷 𝓪 𝓵𝓲𝓯𝓮, 𝔀𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓭𝓲𝓭 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓶𝓪𝓴𝓮 𝓸𝓯 𝓲𝓽?”

[Tristen Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

this one is hard. But definitely beautiful.

[Srinaath · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Gander does with language and form is amazing. I wish some of the longer poems were more cohesive.

[Salty Swift · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though there are passages in this poetry collection that are challenging to follow and tie in to the whole, it is one fantastic piece of writing.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic, experimental explosion of language. Full of thoughts like this:
“The beak-hard
determination to
be a good person,
what happened
to that?”