Forrest Gander
Poetry, Translation, Ecology
Listening to a resonant voice in the field of contemporary ecopoetry and ecopoetics
Description
Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander is widely celebrated as a love poet, a meditative poet, and a poet of ecological awareness. He has always been a writer drawn to cross-cultural encounter, as active in translation as any poet of his generation. This collection of essays on his work brings together an international range of poets, novelists, critics, and translators, including Charles Altieri, Stephanie Burt, Julia Fiedorczuk, Jorie Graham, and Jeanette Winterson.
The collection features interviews as well as essays of different kinds—reviews, appreciations, and interpretations—and they address Gander’s poetry, fiction, and translations. They illuminate major concerns at the heart of all his work: eros, companionship, loss, renewal, an openness to the life all around us, and a rapt attention to the natural world.
Robert Baker is Professor of English at the University of Montana.
Reviews
“Forrest Gander: Poetry, Translation, Ecology, edited by Robert Baker, is a spectacular celebratory event. It is profoundly expansive, intended at once to both unravel and reveal the immense complexities of Forrest Gander’s poetic strata. These fascinating contributions by scholars, translators, and poets, generously shed light on the intensity, vulnerability, and acute porosity of Gander’s singular creative acts. Gander’s work offers us the possibility of living inside his text in a way that defies eco-hierarchy. As the South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon notes about her own poetry: ‘Inside my text, I make the grave of poetry live like a real grave. I make the grave that tastes like milk as birth and death. The place where melons ripen.’ Gander’s great art also lies ‘where melons ripen.’”
- Don Mee Choi, Author of Mirror Nation
“Gander’s poems are public howls that trace a luminous borderland where the self dissolves into the world.”
- Tess Taylor, New York Times Book Review