The Neverending Story

Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost is a book of becoming. This may seem an odd formulation to apply to the work of a poet who has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations and won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2018 collection, Be With. (He has also contributed to Alta Journal.) But then again, that’s the whole idea. “History, a geologist knows, is never far below the surface,” Gander writes in a brief author’s note, reminding us that he was trained in the earth sciences before he began to publish as a poet. “Along the desert’s and my own fault lines, I found myself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating my emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions, the fractures and folds that underlie not only my country, but any self in its relationship with others.”

What he’s describing is the complex conundrum of living, which, he recognizes, is never out of flux.

Mojave Ghost addresses this dynamic with a pointed indirection. Growing out of Gander’s grief at the deaths of his first wife, the poet C.D. Wright, as well as those of his mother and younger sister, the book is slippery, elusive in the most essential sense. Framed, in the poet’s words, as “a novel poem,” it is a full-length work made up of many smaller fragments, which are themselves also fragmented, or faceted, from one line to the next. “It’s not that I is another,” Gander writes, “but that my life is always elsewhere.” In a recent interview, he describes the impetus for the project: “Those deaths have shattered me and staggered my thinking, my feeling, my language. I found I could only write in fragments, in stages, stutters.… My consciousness felt ripped into a present and a past that I couldn’t distinguish from each other.”

It’s an intention the poem renders three-dimensional in moments such as this one, which collapses the layers of time into something like a constant present:

My younger sister died today. My
father died today. My closest friend
died today. My mother died today. Each
of their deaths detonates in iterative
simultaneity inside the tissue
of my being, unanchoring me,
setting me adrift.

Such griefs as are graves.

Think of Mojave Ghost, then, as an excavation of interior geography, of the faults and rift zones of its author’s psyche, his history and memory.

To make the metaphor explicit, Gander uses the lens and language of landscape—or, more particularly, the Mojave, where he was born, and Northern California, where he now lives. What connects them is the San Andreas Fault, sections of which he began to walk in 2021. “So / the ground truth is a constant / revision,” he observes. “Who can read / across the vertiginous stanza / breaks?” To encounter these lines, on a page divided by breaks into five short archipelagoes, represents another instance of dimensionality, in which the imaginative grounding of the poem not only mirrors but also, in some fundamental fashion, becomes the physical territory it describes.

Gander is most acute when he blurs the lines of identity, moving fluidly from first to third person. “Turning his head toward the kitchen,” he remembers of himself,

he notices
and plucks from the shoulder of his sweater
a single long strand of her hair. Holds it up
between thumb and forefinger under the living-
room light. Notices a kind of low
ringing in the air, back behind everything else.
He glances around the empty room—looking for what?
Places the hair back where it had been on his shoulder.

It is as if the moment is too intimate to be recollected in first person, as if the proximity would leave the poet bereft. And yet, isn’t that what these lines do anyway? The lines of the poem, I mean, and also that single line of hair, which he removes and then returns to his shoulder as if it were, as if it might be, the impression of his beloved’s head. The emotion breaks through in almost every word although Gander never telegraphs it; the stanza is a brilliant example of both concision and narrative. The flatness only makes the scene (if we can call it that) more moving, more open, more accessible to our emotion, more redolent with longing and with loss.

I want to remain on this point for a moment because it illustrates what Gander means to do. In this magnificent and nuanced work, he wrestles with the most complicated and contradictory of human experiences: the implacable inevitability of our evanescence, the fallacy of memory, and the failure of time to redeem us, to offer consolation of any kind. “In such hazy places,” he observes,

in moments whose meanings are never clear,
he thinks he catches her scent, that wood-spice
of cumin and verbena. Which is when

the truth breaks through to him.

The language is as clear as the feelings are murky. Ephemerality is everywhere. What does it mean to think he catches her scent? Only that the real thing is no longer available to him. This is the truth that breaks through, that once lost, things and people stay lost, that grief is a state of being, not something to be worked through but rather a landscape of its own. It is formless, inchoate, involving desires that must, by their nature, remain unfulfilled. “Where is the place for them,” the poet asks, “in / geologic time?” The question comes from a series of short verses (many no more than three lines) in which Gander seeks not to distill so much as to record the dissonance he can’t resolve. In my favorite part of the sequence, one set of lines bleeds into those on the facing page.

“A full day’s trudge under the sun,” he recalls,

And no
turning back. Everywhere
they go, it’s as though the land’s
smooth body has been subject to the cuts
of an amateur’s autopsy. Then,

And here, our eyes move to the recto, where the line continues or is picked up again:

in the hours following a brief rain,
cracks at the edges of long wounds
in the terrain begin ferning.

The structure functions like its own sort of fault line, a disruption that reminds us the earth, too, can be scarred, that it is a living body, which means even deep time can never suffice. Wait long enough and everything will disappear, will dissipate: our hearts, our minds, our bodies, the universe itself.

Wait long enough and everything evaporates.

And yet, there is the poem. And yet, there is Gander in the middle of his life, trying to puzzle it all out. “Is there / some quality in me,” he wonders,