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新生
《新生》是甘德2019年普利策获奖诗集《相伴》的续篇。在这本关于生态和爱情的诗集里，甘德探索了我们所处历史时刻的紧迫性，以及个人与个人、个人与自然之间相依相辅的亲密关系。通过与知名真菌学家实地考察，甘德把人类的亲密关系与构成地衣的物种间的共生合作联系起来。《新生》延续前作，中英双语，同时还收录了泰米尔古典文学专家的后记以及甘德自己拍摄的加州红木林照片，是一本内容丰富详实又有创新意义的诗集。
168 pages, Hardcover
First published May 4, 2021
12 people are currently reading
508 people want to read
About the author
Forrest Gander
68 books181 followersBorn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
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November 12, 2021I've never read poetry that was so enamored of fungi before.
May 3, 2022
Well, ok, yes, it figures a guy named Forrest would write poetry about lichen and all manner of foresty nature. But did I enjoy reading about it? No, not really.
Mind you, I’m not really a poetry expert or even a frequent reader. It’s more of an experimental thing with me, something to try now and again. Some of it works for me, a lot of it doesn’t. This didn’t.
The format was all over the place with not a rhyme in sight.
Apparently, lots of it is based on Sangam poetry of Tamil tradition. There’s an essay at the end explaining it. All about interconnectivity with nature and such.
Noble, sure. Go hug a tree. But tell me about it in a way I can appreciate.
Not sure I appreciate much here outside of how much the author’s name suited his subjects.
These leafy mossy intimacies were not quite there.
Mind you, I’m not really a poetry expert or even a frequent reader. It’s more of an experimental thing with me, something to try now and again. Some of it works for me, a lot of it doesn’t. This didn’t.
The format was all over the place with not a rhyme in sight.
Apparently, lots of it is based on Sangam poetry of Tamil tradition. There’s an essay at the end explaining it. All about interconnectivity with nature and such.
Noble, sure. Go hug a tree. But tell me about it in a way I can appreciate.
Not sure I appreciate much here outside of how much the author’s name suited his subjects.
These leafy mossy intimacies were not quite there.
February 14, 2024
Ależ to jest piękne.
November 14, 2021
Twice Alive is not a binary (alive once, alive again), it is a perpetual resurrection. With the reproductive immortality of lichen, the perplexing cyanobacteria at the center of many poems, Gander renders the world alive many times over. Unburdened by the swift linearity of immediate human perception, but never undercutting our sensory experience, these poems find all the ripe potentialities of spirit and nature intwined and expanding in a fecund ecstasy.
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October 1, 2021POST-FIRE FOREST
Shadows of shadows without canopy,
phalanxes of carbonized trunks and
snags, their inner momentum shorted-out.
They surround us in early morning
like plutonic pillars, like mute clairvoyants
leading a Sursum Corda, like the excrescence
of some long slaughter. All that moves
is mist lifting, too indistinct to be called
ghostly, from scorched filamental
layers of rain-moistened earth. What
remains of the forest takes place
in the exclamatory mode. Cindered
utterances in a tongue from which
everything trivial has been volatilized,
everything trivial to fire. In a notch,
between near hills stubbled
with black paroxysm, we spot
a familiar sun, liquid glass globed
at the blowpipe’s tip. If this landscape
is dreaming, it must dream itself awake.
You have, everyone notes, a rare talent
for happiness. I wonder how
to value that, walking through wreckage.
On the second day, a black-backed
woodpecker answers your call, but we
search until twilight without finding it.
Shadows of shadows without canopy,
phalanxes of carbonized trunks and
snags, their inner momentum shorted-out.
They surround us in early morning
like plutonic pillars, like mute clairvoyants
leading a Sursum Corda, like the excrescence
of some long slaughter. All that moves
is mist lifting, too indistinct to be called
ghostly, from scorched filamental
layers of rain-moistened earth. What
remains of the forest takes place
in the exclamatory mode. Cindered
utterances in a tongue from which
everything trivial has been volatilized,
everything trivial to fire. In a notch,
between near hills stubbled
with black paroxysm, we spot
a familiar sun, liquid glass globed
at the blowpipe’s tip. If this landscape
is dreaming, it must dream itself awake.
You have, everyone notes, a rare talent
for happiness. I wonder how
to value that, walking through wreckage.
On the second day, a black-backed
woodpecker answers your call, but we
search until twilight without finding it.
July 17, 2024
Udało mi się rozpoznać kilka małych arcydzieł. Cytat z autora rozpoczynający posłowie tłumaczki - "Poezja nic w ogóle nie mówi [...], poezja słucha" - idealnie odpowiada temu czego doświadcza się czytając jego wiersze.
Subiektywna lista "małych arcydzieł":
"Sielanka", "Ku nam", "Nocne surfowanie w Bolinas", W górach, Hrabstwo Placer" i cykl Sekwoje.
Subiektywna lista "małych arcydzieł":
"Sielanka", "Ku nam", "Nocne surfowanie w Bolinas", W górach, Hrabstwo Placer" i cykl Sekwoje.
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February 4, 2022“Who need be afraid of the merge?” Walt Whitman
In the mountains, Placer Country— a favorite in this collection.
Lichen as metaphor for intimacy. “Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?”
“Sangam refers to a gathering of individuals united in spirit, sharing a common vision, and, in a metaphysical sense, seeking meaning and purpose in a state of togetherness. The element of conviviality guides and nourishes the community of seekers, though it needs to be states without any ambiguity that the commonness of seeking does not erase differences and divergences among individuals who form such a community. Homogeneity and hierarchy are aliens to a true Sangam. The particular and specific visions of different individuals only enhance the spirit of Sangam.”
- N. Manu Chakravarthy
“The metamorphosis of nature in Sangam poetry is essentially an internalization of the exterior landscape”
- N. Manu Chakravarthy
It was difficult for me to see beyond a kind of colonization of nature with man’s experience at first. The imposition of our thoughts and experiences on nature. What some might think of lichen in relation to what it lives on. But our experiences put on nature don’t make nature any less itself or complex, especially when done with curiosity and a blind grasping at feeling, when done without a sense of definition or conclusion.
Is there a phrase or word that fits more perfectly this collection, the spirit of Sangam, and the eradication of the idea that we are all singular and not extremely combinatory than contiguous? Specifically the end of Rexroth’s Cabin- “as you become your • shadow fluidly contiguous • with the shadows of trees”
“In a complex and sophisticated manner, Gander’s poetry contests simplistic and reductionist binaries of East and West, Tamil and English.”
- N. Manu Chakravarthy
Maybe Sangam is something truly in opposition to our Western classics like the Odyssey. Not humanity becoming nature or vice versa or stuck in between somehow, but both at the same time and together and separate, I suppose, twice alive.
In the mountains, Placer Country— a favorite in this collection.
Lichen as metaphor for intimacy. “Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?”
“Sangam refers to a gathering of individuals united in spirit, sharing a common vision, and, in a metaphysical sense, seeking meaning and purpose in a state of togetherness. The element of conviviality guides and nourishes the community of seekers, though it needs to be states without any ambiguity that the commonness of seeking does not erase differences and divergences among individuals who form such a community. Homogeneity and hierarchy are aliens to a true Sangam. The particular and specific visions of different individuals only enhance the spirit of Sangam.”
- N. Manu Chakravarthy
“The metamorphosis of nature in Sangam poetry is essentially an internalization of the exterior landscape”
- N. Manu Chakravarthy
It was difficult for me to see beyond a kind of colonization of nature with man’s experience at first. The imposition of our thoughts and experiences on nature. What some might think of lichen in relation to what it lives on. But our experiences put on nature don’t make nature any less itself or complex, especially when done with curiosity and a blind grasping at feeling, when done without a sense of definition or conclusion.
Is there a phrase or word that fits more perfectly this collection, the spirit of Sangam, and the eradication of the idea that we are all singular and not extremely combinatory than contiguous? Specifically the end of Rexroth’s Cabin- “as you become your • shadow fluidly contiguous • with the shadows of trees”
“In a complex and sophisticated manner, Gander’s poetry contests simplistic and reductionist binaries of East and West, Tamil and English.”
- N. Manu Chakravarthy
Maybe Sangam is something truly in opposition to our Western classics like the Odyssey. Not humanity becoming nature or vice versa or stuck in between somehow, but both at the same time and together and separate, I suppose, twice alive.
September 30, 2021
Gander weaves in names of flora and biological processes, but this is not the dry terminology of an ecology textbook. In his poetry, the language sings, vibrant and alive, rhapsodic, just right. (Also, I haven’t encountered pudendum in a poem outside of Chaucer, but here’s Forrest, pulling it off so casually… How?!)
With an ear so delicately attuned to the sonorous, he’s made it such that I don’t need a geology degree or a knowledge of middle English to be, utterly and immediately, immersed. In fact, I find his poems endeavor beyond the confident, categorical depiction of the world as proffered by science. Gander writes of, “a / vascular language prior to our / breathed language, corporeal, chemical, / drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning / us to what we’ve not yet seen, the surround / calling us, theory-less, toward an inference.”
He beckons us, “theory-less” to hear the world, to see it and taste it, stripped of our preconfigured categories and definitions. And though he’s ostensibly writing about the natural world, I can’t help but find myself through his poems. Questions of love and intimacy, modern life, technology, and the economy… he doesn’t hit me over the head with aggrandized consideration of our place in this world, but delicately evokes my humble reflection. I discover such expansiveness—sumptuous, rich depths—through the attention his poems pay to the seemingly trivial or minute—moss and mushrooms, bird calls, a fire-scorched tree. As he describes his own perspective, “I don’t believe in * objective description, only * this mess, experience, the perceived * world sometimes shared.” And when his work takes us beyond objective description, ventures toward the possibility of shared experience—well, it’s transcendent. I think Gander puts it best in one of my favorite lines from Twice Alive: “against odds I’ve known even / rapture.”
With an ear so delicately attuned to the sonorous, he’s made it such that I don’t need a geology degree or a knowledge of middle English to be, utterly and immediately, immersed. In fact, I find his poems endeavor beyond the confident, categorical depiction of the world as proffered by science. Gander writes of, “a / vascular language prior to our / breathed language, corporeal, chemical, / drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning / us to what we’ve not yet seen, the surround / calling us, theory-less, toward an inference.”
He beckons us, “theory-less” to hear the world, to see it and taste it, stripped of our preconfigured categories and definitions. And though he’s ostensibly writing about the natural world, I can’t help but find myself through his poems. Questions of love and intimacy, modern life, technology, and the economy… he doesn’t hit me over the head with aggrandized consideration of our place in this world, but delicately evokes my humble reflection. I discover such expansiveness—sumptuous, rich depths—through the attention his poems pay to the seemingly trivial or minute—moss and mushrooms, bird calls, a fire-scorched tree. As he describes his own perspective, “I don’t believe in * objective description, only * this mess, experience, the perceived * world sometimes shared.” And when his work takes us beyond objective description, ventures toward the possibility of shared experience—well, it’s transcendent. I think Gander puts it best in one of my favorite lines from Twice Alive: “against odds I’ve known even / rapture.”
December 12, 2021
"Twice Alive" refers to both lichens, which appear throughout this book, and a strong human couple. I think anyway, as usual with poetry I am not 100% sure what the author intended, but that is what I got out of this.
Most of these poems are commentary on nature--post-fire Marin County, a redwood forest, oak trees, scrub and stellar jays, crows harassing a hawk. People do appear--usually a couple, in nature. Surfing in Bolinas, walking in the woods.
I enjoyed this, I know these landscapes so can easily picture them based on Gander's descriptions, and his word choice is wonderful.
Apparently this book is based on? Is? Sangam poetry from the Tamil tradition, and there is a short essay by N. Manu Chakravarthy who is a professor in Bengaluru. I did not much understand this essay, as I have no background.
Favorite poem: Wasteland (for Santa Rosa)
Most of these poems are commentary on nature--post-fire Marin County, a redwood forest, oak trees, scrub and stellar jays, crows harassing a hawk. People do appear--usually a couple, in nature. Surfing in Bolinas, walking in the woods.
I enjoyed this, I know these landscapes so can easily picture them based on Gander's descriptions, and his word choice is wonderful.
Apparently this book is based on? Is? Sangam poetry from the Tamil tradition, and there is a short essay by N. Manu Chakravarthy who is a professor in Bengaluru. I did not much understand this essay, as I have no background.
Favorite poem: Wasteland (for Santa Rosa)
November 19, 2021
The author's note about lichen shifted the earth for me. And then came the aubades! "Wasteland (For Santa Rosa)" has the "frass, that / fine dandruff of excrement / and boring dust" -- omg yes. I loved being in this land and looking so high and low and its entanglements with humans, our oils and breaths.
January 17, 2022
I'll preface this by saying that I often have a hard time getting into poetry. Usually I have better success with nature themes so I thought this would be a good fit. I did quite enjoy the last poem and I think it will stick with me, but all the others were just too odd structurally for my taste.
February 7, 2022
really loved the concept and themes & was excited to read this! but just didn't get into the poetry itself. not sure how to articulate but the writing did not feel particularly immersive to me. this is one i might pick up again because i want to enjoy it more than i did.
August 25, 2022
Lots of aesthetic beauty here, but it didn’t feel like Gander really has anything to say.
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April 10, 2024Well, it's by no means a normal book. For those unfamiliar, it's a book of poetry that is a mix of lichen mycology/ecology and the Indian Sangram spiritual tradition. Here's a sample from the intro, which I found highly amusing: "What many of is learned about lichen--that it's an indicator species for pollution (litmus, in fact, is derived from lichen) and that its the synergistic alliance of fungus or cynobacteria--is largely true, but simplified." First what high school did this guy go to? Did you learn any of that about lichen in high school. Or, ever? But, more importantly, I'd say, if that doesn't draw you in, don't bother reading the book.
I wasn't particularly won over by the poems. They are complex and highly pendantic. And yet the spiritualism of the Sangram tradition lends a quiet simplicity and purity to them, so I did feel it wasn't a waste of my time. At least one clear message is that there is a synergy between things in the world, even individuals are not individual, a message I already knew one might say and yet was compelling in its elaboration here. There was also a nice subsection about Redwoods with his own photography that is compellingly connected to the poems.
Hard to know what to make of this book. On that note, however, it's certainly got a complexity to it that goes beyond most things one will read.
I wasn't particularly won over by the poems. They are complex and highly pendantic. And yet the spiritualism of the Sangram tradition lends a quiet simplicity and purity to them, so I did feel it wasn't a waste of my time. At least one clear message is that there is a synergy between things in the world, even individuals are not individual, a message I already knew one might say and yet was compelling in its elaboration here. There was also a nice subsection about Redwoods with his own photography that is compellingly connected to the poems.
Hard to know what to make of this book. On that note, however, it's certainly got a complexity to it that goes beyond most things one will read.
November 7, 2022
It would be presumptuous to write a review here in any way more helpful than the moving and spirited interview Zack Finch conducted with the poet at https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-th... in the Adroit Journal. In 2019 I was lucky to attend the collaborative event Forrest Gander and his sculptor partner Ashwini Bhat presented at Arion Press at the Presidio (mentioned even in this book) and where one of the poems in this collection -Immigrant Sea - was made into a beautiful broadside that I have now. The full feeling of many kinds of collaboration and intimacies are what go into these incredible poems. Readers unfamiliar with the geological terms or or other natural science words will be rewarded by listening to them in context or looking them up with their images. The sound a towhee bird or a Steller's jay makes can also be heard in an online recording.
March 26, 2025
A collection of poems about nature, lichen, relationships, and humanity.
from Unto Ourselves: "concentrated / into the early evenings / like one of those spectral white / fallow deer introduced to the headlands / that began to outcompete / native species and so, / before they were slaughtered every one / by hired hunters, inciting / arguments about what was native if / all systems are given to change. Maybe / our ear twitches. Maybe the deer's ear / twitches. But we still can't quite / make out in the dimness / what we're looking for, can we?"
from Sangam Acoustics II: "All that moves / is mist lifting, too indistinct to be called / ghostly, from scorched filamental / layers of rain-moistened earth. What / remains of the forest takes place in the exclamatory mode."
from Unto Ourselves: "concentrated / into the early evenings / like one of those spectral white / fallow deer introduced to the headlands / that began to outcompete / native species and so, / before they were slaughtered every one / by hired hunters, inciting / arguments about what was native if / all systems are given to change. Maybe / our ear twitches. Maybe the deer's ear / twitches. But we still can't quite / make out in the dimness / what we're looking for, can we?"
from Sangam Acoustics II: "All that moves / is mist lifting, too indistinct to be called / ghostly, from scorched filamental / layers of rain-moistened earth. What / remains of the forest takes place in the exclamatory mode."
March 21, 2022
Brilliant radiant poems of Didion-esque California-centric Flavor
This is a book to read and come back to and re-read. It’s really well written and provides layers of detail to lean into. As an engineer with a lot of science and natural science training, I really loved the transmogrified method of discussing nature and natural phenomena and lacing that with human experience.
Sangam poetry is indeed a pretty chill format.
This is a book to read and come back to and re-read. It’s really well written and provides layers of detail to lean into. As an engineer with a lot of science and natural science training, I really loved the transmogrified method of discussing nature and natural phenomena and lacing that with human experience.
Sangam poetry is indeed a pretty chill format.
September 16, 2024
Tallinn. Poetry is not my thing but I can enjoy it. I did not enjoy this although I wouldn’t say it was bad. I didn’t get a sense of rhythm or pacing (although I acknowledge this is partially my fault for using an ereader for poetry). More interesting to me are the people pollening in Your Utopia. Taken individually or as a whole this didn’t evoke anything in me the way I assume it was intended: sadness, anger, reverence, fear… I suppose I prefer my ecological messaging via sci fi.
November 7, 2021
2.5 stars. This book feels a little bit like the inception of cultural appropriation. To use a writing style that has deep cultural ties (to a culture you do not belong) and then have someone from the culture write about how wonderful you are & what you did to capture the "essence" of the culture? It's questionable for me.
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January 4, 2026I don't know if I got this type of poetry. I was hoping to find some romantic poetry books to inspire vow writing, but this wasn't it. I was impressed with his variety of words used to express different ideas! Lots of beautiful imagery. I'm going to refrain from rating because I feel I am not qualified to.
December 21, 2023
Rating: 3.5/5 (rounded up)
A really interesting project about lichen’s proposed immortality, the Californian landscape, and the ways we connect to each other, I ended up respecting “Twice Alive” even as I was more intrigued by the concepts rather then the resulting poems.
A really interesting project about lichen’s proposed immortality, the Californian landscape, and the ways we connect to each other, I ended up respecting “Twice Alive” even as I was more intrigued by the concepts rather then the resulting poems.
April 16, 2024
This is a staggering work that blends personal and ecological in absolutely incredible ways. Gander has such an ear for language and uses it, often, to surprise. I thought this collection was remarkable.
October 6, 2024
Avoiding the solipsism of so much contemporary poetry and pulling in information on the natural world, the book would be stronger at half the length—its structure seems to have encouraged poems that feel intellectually, consciously created rather than emerging out of the poetic psyche.
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April 30, 2025horny nature poems that were honestly pretty good but then i got the ick with the fear-of-getting-canceled letter at the end
favorites
- the aubades
- the unto ourselveses
- sea: night surfing in bolinas
- the pastorals
favorites
- the aubades
- the unto ourselveses
- sea: night surfing in bolinas
- the pastorals
April 17, 2021
Across the valley, on
Sugarloaf Ridge, the full
moon showed up
like a girl doing cartwheels.
No one goes on living
the life that isn’t there.
—Wasteland (For Santa Rosa), p31
Sugarloaf Ridge, the full
moon showed up
like a girl doing cartwheels.
No one goes on living
the life that isn’t there.
—Wasteland (For Santa Rosa), p31
July 4, 2021
Beautiful. Lichen poetry that is also...sexy? Yes.
September 24, 2021
“In the Mountains” (26)
December 6, 2021
4.5, this was beautiful
December 19, 2021
Weirdly creepy and heteronormative for a book of poetry about lichen.
March 15, 2022
I'm not smart enough for this one.
Or at least, that's how these poems make me feel :/
Or at least, that's how these poems make me feel :/
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews