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An unforgettable, sensual novel by "oneof the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman)."Heroism is a secondary virtue," Albert Camusnoted, "but friendship is primary." In hisgem-like first novel, Forrest Gander writes offriendship, envy, and eros as a harmonic ofcharged overtones. Set in a rural southernlandscape as vivid as its indelible characters,As a Friend tells the story of Les, agifted man and land surveyor, whose impact onthose around him (his friend Clay, hisgirlfriend Sarah) provokes intenseself-examination and an atmosphere of dangerouseroticism. With poetic insight, Gander exploresthe nature of attraction, betrayal, and loyalty. What he achieves is brilliant in style andpowerfully unsettling. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Brilliant and sensitive writing
As a French reader, it has been an amazing escape to discover Gander's way to describe, tell, make us feeling tansported by this story. I don't know very well the American litterature, but this novel is simpy fabulous. Special mention for the characters' complexity.

Beautifully written, beautifully told.
Not much more to say.A splendid surprise of a modern piece of literature.

Heartbreaking brevity
A prose poem more than a novel, this is the story of a man so gifted, magnetic and maddening that those who love him want to either become him or destroy him. It is heartbreaking writing. As a character and as a man, Les is terrifying in both his charisma and his dishonesty. One detail remains stuck in my mind; how when he couldn't find a glass, he bore a drink of cold water to his girlfriend in his own mouth. Something about that gesture conveys the perfection of Les, and the doom, because no one who had been loved by him would ever get over it.

Opening
Poet Forrest Gander opens his first work of fiction, As a Friend, with a description of childbirth that will tend to lead childless readers to remain so. It's the birth of protagonist Les to a teenage mother. The structure of As a Friend entails four connected stories, with Les tying them together. Les is a quirky and charismatic individual who works as a land surveyor. His friend, Clay, emulates him and then betrays him. Gander's descriptive language is poetic throughout this odd book. Les is made larger than life in some respects, almost godlike, and his flaws seem pedestrian and defining at the same time. While married to Cora, Les lives with Sarah. As a Friend is loaded with lamentations, and part of it soars with such emotional intensity that I found I had to pause a while before reading on.

Rating: Two-star (Mildly Recommended)

Harvest Time
The other reviewer gets it right, though I would not call this a detective story it's clearly an experiment in mixing up genres and blending them together.Each of the novel's four parts has its own form, perhaps to lure you in, for they progress from the fairly traditional to the more and more difficult.I opened this book to around page 80 and nearly gave it up, convinced I wasn't even going to be able to penetrate it, but luckily common sense convinced me to start again this time from page one, and maybe that would be easier going.Sure enough, by the time I reached page 80 through this method I was on an endorphin high and I felt that the author was writing directly onto my brain.

The main character, a poet and land surveyor called Les, lives somewhere in the south, maybe Tennessee or Arkansas, where his dark and smoldering good looks make hopeless wrecks out of the men and women who can't help loving that man.Even though Les is fairly obscure someone is apparently making a documentary film of his life.It become clear that Les is living the "Captain's paradise" sort of lifestyle, he's married to one woman (Cora) while living with another (Sarah, a poet herself), but the hounds of hell lope after him as well.It's hard to write this sort of Byronic, doomed, charismatic character, and I have yet to work out exactly how Forrest Gander succeeds so splendidly, but part of it must be the choices he makes in his narrators and the focus he pays on the way they perceive not only his sensual attractions but the entire landscape and social milieu in which he dwells.In a way the book feels very private and raw, and in other ways it feels very public, because that's the double edge of the roman a clef, and AS A FRIEND is patently a novel inspired by the real life poet Frank Stanford (1948-78) and yet it isn't about Stanford entirely.

The opening scene is a graphic account of Les' birth, it is like something Steinbeck tore out of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, too vivid, too violent.Chapter two is told by Clay, Les' co-worker out in the muddy landscapes of south central Ozark country.Clay doesn't identify as gay but has to come to terms with the fact that he is finding his buddy almost terrifying attractive.His turmoil results in a shocking twist I won't spoil here but it is like a James Cain noir story of lives torn apart by a simple word spoken into the wrong woman's ear.I guess I keep thinking of 30s antecedents for Forrest Gander's novel, --maybe it's the WPA lifestyle these boys embody, in their rattletrap trucks and their smoky roadhouses and addiction to jazz music.

In part three Sarah, Les' love interest, gets to speak her mind in the months after a violent and devastating event.Not since Bessie Smith sang about those "Empty Bed Blues" have I listened to such a Biblical type of sorrow, studded with glimpses of the real and mirrored by a frightening absence.

All in all it's a fantastic book, though if Amazon is saying this volume is 192 pages they're overestimating it by 80 or 90 percent.And what about that clunker of a title?Wasn't there the editor at New Directions to take Forrest Gander out to lunch and tell him, "Änd as a friend, get a new f--ing title."But otherwise I expect you will be riveted as I was by this amazing and unexpected masterpiece. ... Read more

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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.Amazon.com Review
There's a lustrous assurance to Forrest Gander's poems, as if each one were a solution to a problem the poet had worked out before he wrote a word.With his third book, Science & Steepleflower, Gander also provesthat he is among the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation.The collection is remarkable for its mixture of forms and sheer immediacy.And the titles alone are proof of the author's philosophicalambition--there's "Duration and Simultaneity," "The History of ManifestDestiny," and "Deflection Toward the Relative Minor":

But the clarity
of the word "is"
is a deception.

Customer Reviews (2)

"The audacious originality of the ordinary..."
I've thought and thought (in a sort of diffuse, even off-handed way) about what it means to have epiphany and/or transformation occur in a poem.This morning, reading Forrest Gander's "Science & Steepleflower," I realizedthat I was "reading" along a rocky, bouldered watercourse.It was likeexperiencing manifestations of "other" inside the confining condition ofbeing "other," or "manifest," oneself.Or, like trying to see red with ared gel (mylar film) one one's eyeglasses.

I drowsed for a moment afterswirling inside Gander's poem "Sinister," and I dreamed a recipe.Onwaking, I couldn't remember the recipe itself, but only the feeling ofhaving "arrived" at a final result, a beautiful, culminating dish.Take aningredient (by itself insipid) and another ingredient (well, a littleinteresting, but hardly remarkable as a single taste), and fold and stirand mix and heat and grill and broil and voila! we arrive at the epiphanal,transformational, alchemical dish...like no other, and born of enactingstep-by-step procedures.A recipe is an agenda.The resulting dish is thefinal distinction."As if a distinction might be drawn at the end of acontinuum."(from "Duration and Simultaneity")

I don't experience thepoetry of Science and Steepleflower, however, as having "arrived," ashaving reached any particular point along a continuum.Rather, as inPicasso's portraits, these poems look at "reality" from multipleperspectives, and simultaneously.That activitiy is, in itself, theepiphany or transformation for the writer/reader.In ordinary states ofconsciousness, we tend to take single perspectives, consider singularevents, singular meanings, and generally come down on one side or anotherof a dialectic.We are rarely content to hover in potentiality,possibility, and contingency, more often wanting resting places ofsynthesis, resolution, articulated meaning that takes on the gloss of fact. As Gander says in "Knife on a Plate," "A donkey finds a magic pebble.Thereferents / for the story's terms / are a function of the story itself, /and the boy knows there is no one world / we approach by approximations. //Only choose and choose and choose / cracks over us.I jolt awake- / but notime has passed".

So, how do we hear and see the world through all of ourown racket and clutter, our own noise and debris?I listen to this uncannyphrase from "Duration and Simultaneity":"The cicada collapses its owneardrum, blocking out / its own song or goes deaf" and realize that this is(often) how I go through my own life.The double-bind is that by shuttingdown "self-perception," I shut down "other-perception," unlike the cicada,who appears to have a more selective eardrum!I (often) imagine that myown "song" and the "song" of everything/everyone else are distinct, evenautonomous entities...when in fact, they are enmeshed in a matrix ofsameness and only pop out into a sort of "on-off, yes-no" manifestation. Yet, at the same time, it is my own "song," my interpretations and storiesabout the world, my likes and dislikes, that drown out awareness of all theother "songs" of the world. I make up so many stories, look sofrantically for the unusual and unknown to stimulate myself in the midst ofthe auditory and visual racket I create.If only, as Gander writes in"Knife on a Plate," I could more often know that "The / audaciousoriginality of the ordinary / sometimes suggests an opening / and to enteris to hear the measure / not of nostalgia but nearness-that fetching / lackof doubt and perspective, a world / zoomed-in close / enough to count theblack ants / under dog-stunted spirea...There is disturbance like a kiss /through which cognition disappears."Now, after all this mentalcud-chewing on Forrest's poetry, I haven't even hinted at the incrediblyerotic trances this book invokes...(August 8, 1998)

"...the plum side/not facing us but richer/In contingency.."
I think of Holderlin's line in "Bread and Wine': "...and what are poets for in a destitute time?" and think to myself "THIS, this is what poets are for." Yes, there is that "inbred (and often haunting) spirituality, bringing new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace" that is promised on the blurb on the back of the book, but so much more, in these poems "I hear the black tongues crawling my forearm/called by your voice, your cool matutinal warbling, to enrich/my hearing with another hearing." This is a poetry that goes into the bone and needles the marrow out of its sleep crawl. It *thrums* ... Read more

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"Among the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman).

The three long poems in Eye Against Eye convey the wrought particulars of intimate human relations, perceptions of the landscape, and the historical moment, tense with political exigencies. Mayan ruins invoke the collapsing Twin Towers, love between parents and child blister with tension, and a bicycle thief shatters the narcotic illusion of a private accord. Also contained is "Late Summer Entry," a series of poetic commentaries on Sally Mann's landscape photographs. Eye Against Eye, Forrest Gander's third book with New Directions, cries out an ethical concern for the ways we see each other and the world, the potential to share a vision that acknowledges our commonality. As always with Gander's poetry, suspensions and repetitions drive toward a complex emotional experience, evoking the multifaceted, multi-vocal surge of our present. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Terrific!
A friend of mine lent me a copy of this book, and I had to buy my own copy. By far the best thing here is a sequence of poems facing b&w photos by Sally Mann. The descriptions and the poeticizing are truly gorgeous, without being obvious on the one hand, or nebulous on the other. The effects are also pleasingly varied; the poet seems inspired, not merely seeking novelty. I'll quote one passage, as example of the haunting beauty of these poems: "The depicted instant: a galvanic pre-storm eclipse. On a bridge, the photographer bends, shrouded behind her tripod. As she guesses the exposure time, lightning hisses and rips so close that the air, for seconds, isn't breathable. At once, the river quicksilvers. Its surface bulks and brightens. The heft of the scene, though, and the dynamic tension flee to the margins."

Somewhat less successful are three longish poems rounding out the book - a disjointed meditation on Mayan ruins, a wide-ranging evocation of our distracted age aptly called "Present Tense," and a dreamy retelling of the poet's brushing encounter with a bicycle thief in the Mission district of San Francisco. The first seems to me to err on the side of solemnity, with some questionable diction and some vague statements ("the exposure vesicles inward"; "The fragility of presence. A bird perched at the tip of a branch." etc). The second is lovingly written, but predictably unfocused; while the last is a tad sentimental. "Someone and someone's grief / careen around a corner," but the poet is very much himself, on vacation, as he is in the first instance perhaps. The writing is still lovely and resonant though.

I've ignored thus far the prelude poem and the page fillers called "ligatures," that in my opinion do little except to indulge in some fashionable postmodernistic poetics. Gander's gifts don't need that kind of credential, thank goodness; though it's no big deal, if it wins him more readers. (The friend who lent me this book is a real po-mo freak!) A very enjoyable book. Recommended! ... Read more

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A new collection by one of America's most respected young experimental poets. In his new collection Torn Awake, Gander continues to blend passion with intelligence, unveiling the forces of physical nature and personhood, the self as a construction of reciprocally reflective relations. Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery. REVIEW: A sound master.... Eros presides over his generous poems that ring with the wondrous names of lowly things. (The Village Voice Literary Supplement) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"A New Range of Feeling"
I read quite a bit of contemporary poetry, but this book knocked me out.I had lost myself with enjoyment by the end of the first page, scribbling "Great line!" with my nubbed pencil in the margin.What can I tell you?Forrest Gander is wildly avante garde at times; you may also find him writing sonnet-sequences.Either way, you will read lines that you've never read before; and even when you have no idea what Forrest is talking about on the first read, you'll still know that this is great stuff.Subject matters range from geology to erotic love to some great explorations of father-son relationships.

Each sequence is punctuated by a poem with "Love's Letter" in the title.One of these has a line which goes, "The trace on my lips of her nipples' rouge improves the taste of wine."You could likewise say that, for me, the aftertaste of "Torn Awake" improves the taste of life.

Who Needs Poetry Now
This book un-numbed me.Gander's trademark shifts between lyric and abstraction, between figure and ground create tensions that open the ordinary, the daily numbness which, "torn," gives voice to our exigency.Sure, he has a formidable intelligence, but when the poem suddenly shifts focus from the welter of involved thought to, for instance, a wet dog's face reflected in a hubcap, you feel a vivid, PHYSICAL recognition of the way we negotiate actual experience.That back and forth ballet takes place in each of the book's long poems.Typically, the landscape seems to orient our mode of perception.But clear images retreat as language itself comes to the forefront of our attention.And just when our attention to the EVENT of language begins to falter, we fall through the words again into recognitions of the erotic, the political, our dire and fragile world.In a way, all the poems also involve translation (of Spanish, of geology, of interactions between child and parent, etc.).It's easy to be swept into Gander's orchestrations of rhythmic movements-with an intensifying sense of what?Human presence?Gravitas?I feel summoned toward a sharper intellectual and emotional awareness where I locate an intensified possibility of myself.The title gongs: Torn Awake. ... Read more

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An anthology of contemporary poetry by a variety of Mexican authors
Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico is an anthology of contemporary poetry by a variety of Mexican authors. Each poem is presented in its original Spanish and in English translation, and cover a broad variety of themes in this compilation ideal for classroom study or private reading. Authors represented include Elsa Cross, Francisco Hernandez, Jose Luis Rivas, Alberto Blanco, and many more. Approximately four to six of each author's brief poems are showcased in this eclectic anthology that reflects the energetic spirit of Mexican poetry. "Dispersion": I rip off this Persian robe / and lots petals fly / around the room. // Nevertheless, the fallen colors, / my naked body, / shivering, / reminds me of dispersion. // The stars / pierce with anise the dark sky. / I see myself melt away in God's abyss / and not in your arms.
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A long overdue collection of critical writing on Oppen's substantial legacy.

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A brilliantly translated bilingual edition of poems by one of Mexico's foremost woman poets.
Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published half a dozen books of poems including the groundbreaking El ser que va a morir (1982) which changed the course of Mexican poetry. Her exquisite long-lined poems evoke the sensual realm where logic is disbanded, wonder evoked. In the words of her translator Forrest Gander, "Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound....Bracho's poems make sense first as music, and music propels them."

From her early collections—Bajo el destello liguido and El ser—to her most recent books La voluntad del ámbar and Ese espacio, ese jardìn (which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize), Firefly under the Tongue offers the first book of English translations by this most important and influential living poet.
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Immanent Visitor is the first English-language translation of the work of Bolivia's greatest and most visionary twentieth-century poet. A poète maudit, Jaime Saenz rejected the conventions of polite society and became a monk in service of his own imagination. Apocalyptic and occult in his politics, a denizen of slum taverns, unashamedly bisexual, insistently nocturnal in his artistic affairs, and secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological, and the symbolic. In masterly translations by two poet-translators, Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, Saenz's strange, innovative, and wildly lyrical poems reveal a literary legacy of fierce compassion and solidarity with indigenous Bolivian cultures and with the destitute, the desperate, and the disenfranchised of that unreal city, La Paz.
In long lines, in odes that name desire, with Whitmanesque anaphora, in exclamations and repetitions, Saenz addresses the reader, the beloved, and death in one extended lyrical gesture. The poems are brazenly affecting. Their semantic innovation is notable in the odd heterogeneity of formal and tonal structures that careen unabashedly between modes and moods; now archly lyrical, now arcanely symbolic, now colloquial, now trancelike. As Saenz's reputation continues to grow throughout the world, these inspired translations and the accompanying Spanish texts faithfully convey the poet's unique vision and voice to English-speaking readers.
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A travelogue that employs diverse settings and styles of poetry. ... Read more

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The author's training as a geologist influences the themes and forms of the poems and the single essay in this book. Often his poetic forms are determined by rock characteristics, even when the concerns of the poem are intensely human. For instance, a poem about a set of perceived relationships at twilight from the "Crystal" section titled "yellow quartz" breaks into six lines and references the passage of light because quartz crystals are pellucid and hexagonal. In another sequence, "Line of Descent," sharply shifting lines of poetry enact the cutbacks and bends of the path into the Grand Canyon by which father and son descend through lines of sediment and lines of story along the bloodline that ties them together. Without calling attention to themselves, such forms underpin the strong emotional terrain upon which all the poems, whether focused on erotic love, fatherhood, the histories of empire, or the dialogue between scientific rationalism and poetic imagination, are situated. With an eye toward what we stand on literally, Gander concentrates our attention toward what we stand on and for in our various relationships with others and with the world ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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A Lannan Translation Selection

Beautifully translated by the award-winning American poet Forrest Gander, the work of highly esteemed Mexican poet Pura López-Colomé is, with this important volume, available in the US for the first time. Selected by Gander from throughout López-Colomé's five books in Spanish, these exceptional poems confront the confinements of fate, history, and misbegotten beliefs.

In forms that blur back and forth between poetry and prose, López-Colomé uses spare and honest language to describe the music of dreams, faith, and faithlessness; hers are poems of the soul resuscitated from the shackles of the body. As Gander notes in his Introduction: "[This] poetry is philosophical and exacting, pared into short, sharp lines, obsidian flakes." Indeed, the fierce intelligence and insistent moral and spiritual engagement of López-Colomé's poetry situate her among the most significant contemporary Mexican poets. No Shelter is a bilingual edition, with English translations appearing in the first half of the text and the Spanish originals in the second.
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This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on September 22, 2008. The length of the article is 305 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Forrest Gander. As a Friend.(Brief article)(Book review)
Author: A.D. Jameson
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2008
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: 28Issue: 3Page: 175(2)

Article Type: Book review, Brief article

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

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Word count: 1408. ... Read more

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In "Lynchburg", Forrest Gander explores the landscape of the rural South. The major poem of the collection centres on Robert Johnson, the Delta blues musician. In lines designed to emphasise metonymy and surprise, Gander's poems evoke the intonations of that part of the world. ... Read more

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A landmark anthology contains poetry from twelve of the brightest modern Mexican women and illustrates the impact that these poets are having on the course of modern Mexican literature. Original. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on March 22, 2000. The length of the article is 1876 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Trinity Fields.
Author: Forrest Gander
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2000
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: 20Issue: 1Page: 87

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more