MADreads

Imbuing the vivid and particular with meaning and dignity

June 2nd, 2009 Tien

Part of the pleasure of reading a book of poems is you can jump around, taking in a few poems at a time – first those ones that immediately appeal to you, then going back to fill in the blanks or pick up the strays at it were. Forrest Gander’s Eye Against Eye is notable for a gorgeous sequence of poems in response to some black-and-white landscapes by the photographer Sally Mann.  I say “respond,” but “interpret” would be more accurate – the poems do the double work of describing and explicating our experience of the photos, since we do not necessarily understand what we see, even if that thing strikes us with emotive force (as the photos certainly do).

Thus a white streak under a bridge in the upper third of a mostly black field becomes a swimmer, whose smooth motion offsets the leaping of a barely-visible branch slightly lower in the foreground, then connects in turn with a blemish in a lower corner on the surface of the print itself.  The blemish ruins the perfection of the print – but it is redeemed.  Easily missed, if Gander hadn’t pointed it out to us, it…

joins together the realms
of seer and swimmer
in our experience of plunging
into and out of the image.

This is what good poetry does best I think, it imbues the vivid and particular (the individual) with meaning and dignity.  In varied and inspired ways, each of the poems does this.  I like most that the effects are so diverse (even visually with the arrangement of words on the page); and the pay-off is so consistent.

Three longish poems round out the book - a meditation on Mayan ruins, a wide-ranging evocation of modern life, and a dreamy retelling of the poet’s encounter with a bicycle thief in the Mission district of San Francisco.  Though less successful, these poems are good representatives of our poets’ concern with information overload, with chance and disintegration.  Then there’s the page fillers called “ligatures,” that indulge in even more cutting edge poetics!

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction, Poetry