Albert Mobilio
In the writer’s “novel-poem,” the movements of memory, mourning, and new beginnings play out against a desert landscape.
Mojave Ghost, by Forrest Gander, New Directions, 78 pages, $15.95
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As anyone who has visited the American Southwest can attest, the bare landscape there presents itself as a story. Whether descending into a canyon or climbing a mesa, your movement through time and history can be visibly traced as you pass layers of sedimentary rock. Temporal scales measured in hundreds of millions of years throw our own exceedingly brief existence into stark relief. The barren environs can both enlarge and diminish mere human concerns, as well as give rise to visionary states—it seems no accident that sacred texts like the Old and New Testaments and the Koran originated in desolate locales. Forrest Gander is, by his own description, a child of the desert: in his author’s note to Mojave Ghost, a volume billed as a “novel-poem,” he declares, “The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert.”
With a somewhat atypical background for a novelist, translator, and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, Gander holds an undergraduate degree in geology and has traveled the world exploring deserts like the Sahara, the Gobi, and the Atacama. While the natural world figures vividly in previous books, Mojave Ghost brings landscape—and its attendant resonances—into dramatic, novelistic play. As we also learn from the author’s note, the poet embarked on an epic journey, hiking parts of the eight-hundred-mile San Andreas Fault after the recent deaths of his mother and wife, the poet C. D. Wright. Joining him on these treks was Indian-born artist Ashwini Bhat. The retrograde motion of memory and mourning enters into dynamic relation with the forward momentum of expedition and fresh intimacy; the tension between these opposing forces yields a range of provocative introspections, as if the narrator were being subjected to tectonic shifts and recording their consequent destabilizations:
However long I mean to hold on to them
as possibilities, my untaken trajectories begin
to shrivel away from my self-identification.
These “untaken trajectories” aren’t just roads not taken—they appear fully in the present as alternative perceptions, turns of consciousness. The poet’s mental atmosphere is ever-changing, always inquisitory. A pastoral image, one as lyrical as it is comforting (“What bird has woven sprigs of lavender, mint, yarrow / and citronella into a nest below our rusted porch light?”), is preceded by the Rimbaud-like assertion “I am otherwise now,” then followed in the next stanza by the intrusion of uncertainty:
I keep revisiting the memory
of that inward flare of exhilaration
when I knew for sure what counted. But
who is ever content with contentment?
As the poem moves through time, between memories, and among voices, the permutations of chronology and scene remain securely fixed within Gander’s measured, contemplative tone. A recollection of a first meeting with a new love interest glides from judicious regard (“I was taken somewhere I haven’t returned from”) to mischievous banter (“Dude, you are purely titty-smacked!”), to land at something Wordsworthian (“Amazed. Like an insect blown by an updraft onto a mountain snowfield”). In its polyvocality and exploration of memory, echoes of another canonical poet—T. S. Eliot—often register, particularly in moments attentive to the incorporeal (“But when the god steps into you, / your shadow disappears”), as well as starkly revelatory conjurations of nature (“Burned oaks footed in naked rock crevices. / A light so sharp, it’s percussive.”). Employing an elevated level of specificity about what he sees and feels, Gander brings us into almost microscopic contact with emotions: first, there is an awareness of being meticulously guided in this all-too-tangible world in which squadrons of quail burst from coyote brush and the waves of the Salton Sea flutter like book pages; then, the strong allure of seduction—“Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”
Gander is preoccupied, if not fascinated, by the nature of thinking. Its vexing circularity: “And what // possible explanation is there / for our wrong turning, but our insistent / repetition of the wrong turning?”; its seeming ubiquity: “But doesn’t thinking happen / everywhere? Not only inside / the human mind. What stays / autonomous from our concern?” This somewhat airy philosophical inclination finds apt complement in the poet’s often surprisingly visceral characterizations of sensation: “In the glimmer and darkfalling / afterglow, my small exuberances / hive in me like worms in a cadaver.” Or: “Your trace on me / like rope marks on the well’s mouth.” These images insinuate themselves under our skin well before they’re fully grasped.
By playing intensely lyrical locutions against more prosaic passages, Gander enacts the mind’s quicksilver variability: we are not always poetic; often we are simply watching. In such a long, discursive work, this is perhaps the only sustainable approach. His description, for instance, of a whistling frog’s breeding call “hopelessly” competing with patio speakers blasting rancheras includes the narrator wondering if it will die of exhaustion before mating. He goes on to note that the bathroom paper-towel dispenser, when pumped, makes a sound “like a bulldog wheezing.” This barroom scene, sans line breaks, could easily appear as prose in a story to make the same points about futility, coincidence, and indifference. Gander’s “novel-poem” features never-named characters—the deceased mother and wife, the new companion (we might guess at such identities based on context but, I think, we remain unsure) are indicated only by pronouns and addressed in apostrophic mode.
Verse and fiction may share these stylistic elements, but they hardly constitute definitive markers of either genre. The novelistic heft that marks this long poem or book of poems derives principally from the narrator’s propulsive presence. The speaker moves open-eyed and open-hearted among loved ones and their ghosts, across tremulous terrain. But most decisively, the poet’s journey is an inward one, a reckoning with emotional history, the myriad selves that clamor within the self, and the mortal finality that hovers just beyond this tumult. In the last lines of Mojave Ghost’s Coda, Gander disappears into the landscape, descending alone, yet perhaps about to rise:
As I continue my solo descent
along the canyon’s seam. As I sip
and hold a quick breath. As I slip from sight
into a chimney of rock.
This is a poetry of consummate awareness that offers instruction on what it might mean to live enraptured by a fractured earth, to steady ourselves against its ruins past and those to come.
Albert Mobilio is the author of four books of poetry: Same Faces (2020), Touch Wood (2011), Me with Animal Towering (2002), and The Geographics (1995). A book of fiction, Games and Stunts, appeared in 2016.