The Blue Rock Collection (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Gander, Forrest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844710459 ISBN 13: 9781844710454

Publisher: Salt, 2004

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

Forrest Gander has degrees in geology and English literature. His recent books include the novel As a Friend, the book of poems Eye Against Eye, and the translation Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho (a PEN Translation Prize Finalist), all from New Directions. A United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, Gander is recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Howard, and Whiting foundations. He has authored essays for numerous journals including The Nation, Boston Review, and The Providence Journal. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University in the United States.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from Field Guide to Southern Virginia

***

True as the circumference

to its center. Woodscreek Grocery,

Rockbridge County. Twin boys

peer from the front window, cheeks

bulging with fireballs. Sandplum trees

flower in clusters by the levee. She

makes a knot on the inside knob

and ties my arms up

against the door. Williamsburg green.

With a touch as faint as a watermark.

Tracing cephalon, pygidium, glabella.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844710459
• ISBN 13: 9781844710454
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Ducornet Rikki
• Number of pages: 128