Gander, Forrest

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Lovely Collection of Poetry
Wonderful tool (and treat!) for those learning Spanish
an exquisite allure
it is all in the title
Great Introduction to Neruda

The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems
Pablo Neruda
Manufacturer: City Lights Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Odes to Common Things, Bilingual Edition

ASIN: 0872864286

Book Description

This collection of Neruda's most essential poems will prove indispensable. Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda's various styles and themes. An impressive group of translators that includes Alistair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman, have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems; and a handful of previously untranslated works are included as well. This selection sets the standard for a general, high--quality introduction to Neruda's complete oeuvre.

Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Customer Reviews:

Lovely Collection of Poetry.......2007-06-01

This beautiful collection of poetry contains both English & Spanish versions of Neruda's poetry. It contains great breadth & depth at the core and encompasses the vastness of Neruda's work - love, politics, everyday life, landscape. This is a GREAT gift book!

Wonderful tool (and treat!) for those learning Spanish.......2006-10-10

My husband is a linguist, and one of the things he suggested I do while learning Spanish is memorize various items -- stories, poems, songs -- that I can say to myself whenever I like. Other than "practice the verbs!" this has been the best language advice I've ever received. It helps me with pronunciation, understanding, fluency -- and, as a major side benefit, I have great pastimes for when I'm waiting in line, or stuck somewhere without a book.
"The Essential Neruda" is a goldmine of beautiful pieces, and most anyone will be able to find a poem that appeals to them enough to learn by heart. "Oda al Libro (II)" is one of my favorites, and it has helped me learn and retain the meanings of several great words.
Side-by-side bilingual texts like this one also serve as terrific motivators for language learners because as we grow in skill and are able to read in both languages, we can evaluate the translators' work and notice where certain nuances and meanings are lost in the shift from one language to another. Being able to understand a writer like Neruda in his original language is a glorious treat!

an exquisite allure.......2006-05-22

Drawn into the appeal of Pablo Neruda through an art project, I
approached this collection of poems taped together and bound by
a red sleeve at a local bookstore. I was moreoverly surprised
at how entrancing and delicately eloquent Neruda's writing style
was--even transcribed from spanish to english. The editor, Mark
Eisner did a fantastic job with the translations, and I didn't
feel like I was succombing to "Kung-Fu movie" subtitles as I
would have expected. This collection brought Neruda's poetry to
a managable and palpable understanding, such as I needed to
thoroughly perceive it. Though Chile, Neruda's homeland, is, as
any other cultured region would be, variable to my own, it
continued to bring insights to my own observations of life--and
all the beauty and exquisite allure contained in it.

it is all in the title.......2006-01-16

As a former student of Spanish literature, I have always held a deep appreciation for the work of Pablo Neruda. I have often wished to share the beauty of his work with friends and family - yet many of them have found Neruda translations to be inaccessible. I have also found that many of the other translations are stilted or do not properly recreate the rhythm and imagery of the Spanish original.
The Essential Neruda combines an excellent overview of Neruda's work with accesible and faithful translation. Whether you are new to the poetry of Pablo Neruda or have already read every one of his works - the Essential Neruda will give you valuable insight into his art and an appreciation of cutting-edge poetry translation.
This book also launched a non-profit organization and on-line community dedicated to Neruda and his work.

Check out www.redpoppy.net to learn about contemporary Neruda translation and scholarship, Chilean politics and more.

It also shows how you can get involved with the legacy of Neruda.

Great Introduction to Neruda.......2006-01-03

If I were to introduce someone to the greatness of Neruda I would give them this book as it gives an insight into his life's poetry.

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The Night (Facing Pages)
Jaime Saenz
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0691124833

Book Description

Jaime Saenz is arguably the greatest Bolivian writer of the twentieth century. His poetry is apocalyptic, transcendent, hallucinatory, brilliant--and, until recently, available only in Spanish. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson's translations of Saenz's work have garnered much-deserved attention and acclaim. Here for the first time in English they give us his masterpiece, The Night, Saenz's most famous poem and the last he wrote before his death in 1986.

An unusual man, Saenz lived his whole life in La Paz, Bolivia, seldom venturing far from the city and its indigenous culture that feature so prominently in his writings. He sought God in unlikely places: slum taverns, alcoholic excess, the street. Saenz was nocturnal. He once stole a leg from a cadaver and hid it under his bed. On his wedding night he brought home a panther.

In this epic poem, Saenz explores the singular themes that possessed him: alcoholism, death, nightmares, identity, otherness, and his love for La Paz. The poem's four movements culminate in some of the most profoundly mystical, beautiful, and disturbing passages of modern Latin American poetry. They are presented here in this faithful and inspired English translation of the Spanish original.

Complete with an introduction by the translators that paints a vivid picture of the poet's life, and an afterword by Luis H. Antezana, a notable Bolivian literary critic and close friend of Saenz, this bilingual edition is the essential introduction to one of the most visionary and enigmatic poets of the Hispanic world.

Science & Steepleflower (New Directions Paperbook)
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"The audacious originality of the ordinary..."

"...the plum side/not facing us but richer/In contingency.."

Science & Steepleflower (New Directions Paperbook)
Forrest Gander
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Amazon.com

There's a lustrous assurance to Forrest Gander's poems, as if each one were a solution to a problem the poet had worked out before he wrote a word. With his third book, Science & Steepleflower, Gander also proves that he is among the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation. The collection is remarkable for its mixture of forms and sheer immediacy. And the titles alone are proof of the author's philosophical ambition--there's "Duration and Simultaneity," "The History of Manifest Destiny," and "Deflection Toward the Relative Minor": <blockquote> But the clarity
of the word "is"
is a deception.
</blockquote> Often Gander uses the equivalent of a wide-angle lens to examine the connection between the subject and its context. "Exhaustible Appearance," written in response to a photograph, begins: "Around the burning barn, stationary objects seem to stream. / Scrub brush, twigs in sinople dirt, dry weeds, / puffballs among scattered breccia and chert." Yes, the vocabulary is rather recondite. But as R.P. Blackmur pointed out in a famous essay on Wallace Stevens, a phrase like "the moonlight fubbed the girandoles" is perfectly comprehensible if you have a dictionary at hand. And in Gander's case, his esoteric lexicon draws attention not only to itself but to the hardscrabble landscape it describes. This is reality, he seems to be saying--even if you have to look it up. --Mark Rudman

Book Description

Science & Steepleflower is a breakthrough book for Forrest Gander, a poet whose richness of language and undaunted lyric passion land him in traditions running from Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Duncan and Michael Ondaatje. His poetry has been called "desperately beautiful" by Thom Gunn in Agni Review, and "original and fascinating" by John Ashbery. With poems in the leading journals of the day--American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few--Gander plumbs the erotic depths of human interaction with the land. The poems in Science & Steepleflower test this relationship with what Publisher's Weekly has called "an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality," bringing us to new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace.

Customer Reviews:

"The audacious originality of the ordinary...".......2000-05-07

I've thought and thought (in a sort of diffuse, even off-handed way) about what it means to have epiphany and/or transformation occur in a poem. This morning, reading Forrest Gander's "Science & Steepleflower," I realized that I was "reading" along a rocky, bouldered watercourse. It was like experiencing manifestations of "other" inside the confining condition of being "other," or "manifest," oneself. Or, like trying to see red with a red gel (mylar film) one one's eyeglasses.

I drowsed for a moment after swirling inside Gander's poem "Sinister," and I dreamed a recipe. On waking, I couldn't remember the recipe itself, but only the feeling of having "arrived" at a final result, a beautiful, culminating dish. Take an ingredient (by itself insipid) and another ingredient (well, a little interesting, but hardly remarkable as a single taste), and fold and stir and mix and heat and grill and broil and voila! we arrive at the epiphanal, transformational, alchemical dish...like no other, and born of enacting step-by-step procedures. A recipe is an agenda. The resulting dish is the final distinction. "As if a distinction might be drawn at the end of a continuum." (from "Duration and Simultaneity")

I don't experience the poetry of Science and Steepleflower, however, as having "arrived," as having reached any particular point along a continuum. Rather, as in Picasso's portraits, these poems look at "reality" from multiple perspectives, and simultaneously. That activitiy is, in itself, the epiphany or transformation for the writer/reader. In ordinary states of consciousness, we tend to take single perspectives, consider singular events, singular meanings, and generally come down on one side or another of a dialectic. We are rarely content to hover in potentiality, possibility, and contingency, more often wanting resting places of synthesis, resolution, articulated meaning that takes on the gloss of fact. As Gander says in "Knife on a Plate," "A donkey finds a magic pebble. The referents / for the story's terms / are a function of the story itself, / and the boy knows there is no one world / we approach by approximations. // Only choose and choose and choose / cracks over us. I jolt awake- / but no time has passed".

So, how do we hear and see the world through all of our own racket and clutter, our own noise and debris? I listen to this uncanny phrase from "Duration and Simultaneity": "The cicada collapses its own eardrum, blocking out / its own song or goes deaf" and realize that this is (often) how I go through my own life. The double-bind is that by shutting down "self-perception," I shut down "other-perception," unlike the cicada, who appears to have a more selective eardrum! I (often) imagine that my own "song" and the "song" of everything/everyone else are distinct, even autonomous entities...when in fact, they are enmeshed in a matrix of sameness and only pop out into a sort of "on-off, yes-no" manifestation. Yet, at the same time, it is my own "song," my interpretations and stories about the world, my likes and dislikes, that drown out awareness of all the other "songs" of the world. I make up so many stories, look so frantically for the unusual and unknown to stimulate myself in the midst of the auditory and visual racket I create. If only, as Gander writes in "Knife on a Plate," I could more often know that "The / audacious originality of the ordinary / sometimes suggests an opening / and to enter is to hear the measure / not of nostalgia but nearness-that fetching / lack of doubt and perspective, a world / zoomed-in close / enough to count the black ants / under dog-stunted spirea...There is disturbance like a kiss / through which cognition disappears." Now, after all this mental cud-chewing on Forrest's poetry, I haven't even hinted at the incredibly erotic trances this book invokes... (August 8, 1998)

"...the plum side/not facing us but richer/In contingency..".......1998-05-15

I think of Holderlin's line in "Bread and Wine': "...and what are poets for in a destitute time?" and think to myself "THIS, this is what poets are for." Yes, there is that "inbred (and often haunting) spirituality, bringing new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace" that is promised on the blurb on the back of the book, but so much more, in these poems "I hear the black tongues crawling my forearm/called by your voice, your cool matutinal warbling, to enrich/my hearing with another hearing." This is a poetry that goes into the bone and needles the marrow out of its sleep crawl. It *thrums*

No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura Lopez-Colome

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No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura Lopez-Colome
Pura Lopez-Colome
Manufacturer: Graywolf Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1555973604

Book Description

A Lannan Translation Selection

Beautifully translated by the award-winning American poet Forrest Gander, the work of highly esteemed Mexican poet Pura López-Colomé is, with this important volume, available in the US for the first time. Selected by Gander from throughout López-Colomé's five books in Spanish, these exceptional poems confront the confinements of fate, history, and misbegotten beliefs.

In forms that blur back and forth between poetry and prose, López-Colomé uses spare and honest language to describe the music of dreams, faith, and faithlessness; hers are poems of the soul resuscitated from the shackles of the body. As Gander notes in his Introduction: "[This] poetry is philosophical and exacting, pared into short, sharp lines, obsidian flakes." Indeed, the fierce intelligence and insistent moral and spiritual engagement of López-Colomé's poetry situate her among the most significant contemporary Mexican poets. No Shelter is a bilingual edition, with English translations appearing in the first half of the text and the Spanish originals in the second.

Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, A Bilingual Edition

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Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, A Bilingual Edition
Jaime Saenz
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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The Night (Facing Pages)

ASIN: 0520230485

Book Description

Immanent Visitor is the first English-language translation of the work of Bolivia's greatest and most visionary twentieth-century poet. A poète maudit, Jaime Saenz rejected the conventions of polite society and became a monk in service of his own imagination. Apocalyptic and occult in his politics, a denizen of slum taverns, unashamedly bisexual, insistently nocturnal in his artistic affairs, and secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological, and the symbolic. In masterly translations by two poet-translators, Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, Saenz's strange, innovative, and wildly lyrical poems reveal a literary legacy of fierce compassion and solidarity with indigenous Bolivian cultures and with the destitute, the desperate, and the disenfranchised of that unreal city, La Paz.
In long lines, in odes that name desire, with Whitmanesque anaphora, in exclamations and repetitions, Saenz addresses the reader, the beloved, and death in one extended lyrical gesture. The poems are brazenly affecting. Their semantic innovation is notable in the odd heterogeneity of formal and tonal structures that careen unabashedly between modes and moods; now archly lyrical, now arcanely symbolic, now colloquial, now trancelike. As Saenz's reputation continues to grow throughout the world, these inspired translations and the accompanying Spanish texts faithfully convey the poet's unique vision and voice to English-speaking readers.

Deeds of Utmost Kindness (Wesleyan Poetry)

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Deeds of Utmost Kindness (Wesleyan Poetry)
Forrest Gander
Manufacturer: Wesleyan University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Torn Awake
Eye Against Eye

ASIN: 0819512125

Book Description

A haunting and peculiar travelogue, Deeds of the Utmost Kindness employs forms as diverse as haiku and prose poetry in settings that range from Japan to the rural Ozarks to contemporary Moscow. The compelling strangeness of the poems' precise details exposes varied rhythms of thought and illustrated how different logics work in the metaphoric structures of changing places . Yet behind the uneasy sense of dislocation felt by the constant traveler lies the personal, essentially moral, voice of the poet as observer.

The Blue Rock Collection (Salt Modern Poets)

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The Blue Rock Collection (Salt Modern Poets)
Forrest Gander
Manufacturer: Salt Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Eye Against Eye

ASIN: 1844710459

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Lynchburg (Pitt Poetry Series)
Forrest Gander
Manufacturer: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr (Trd)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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"A New Range of Feeling"
Who Needs Poetry Now

Torn Awake
Forrest Gander
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0811214869

Book Description

A new collection by one of America's most respected young experimental poets. In his new collection Torn Awake, Gander continues to blend passion with intelligence, unveiling the forces of physical nature and personhood, the self as a construction of reciprocally reflective relations. Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery. REVIEW: A sound master.... Eros presides over his generous poems that ring with the wondrous names of lowly things. (The Village Voice Literary Supplement)

Customer Reviews:

"A New Range of Feeling".......2001-10-30

I read quite a bit of contemporary poetry, but this book knocked me out. I had lost myself with enjoyment by the end of the first page, scribbling "Great line!" with my nubbed pencil in the margin. What can I tell you? Forrest Gander is wildly avante garde at times; you may also find him writing sonnet-sequences. Either way, you will read lines that you've never read before; and even when you have no idea what Forrest is talking about on the first read, you'll still know that this is great stuff. Subject matters range from geology to erotic love to some great explorations of father-son relationships.

Each sequence is punctuated by a poem with "Love's Letter" in the title. One of these has a line which goes, "The trace on my lips of her nipples' rouge improves the taste of wine." You could likewise say that, for me, the aftertaste of "Torn Awake" improves the taste of life.

Who Needs Poetry Now.......2001-10-17

This book un-numbed me. Gander's trademark shifts between lyric and abstraction, between figure and ground create tensions that open the ordinary, the daily numbness which, "torn," gives voice to our exigency. Sure, he has a formidable intelligence, but when the poem suddenly shifts focus from the welter of involved thought to, for instance, a wet dog's face reflected in a hubcap, you feel a vivid, PHYSICAL recognition of the way we negotiate actual experience. That back and forth ballet takes place in each of the book's long poems. Typically, the landscape seems to orient our mode of perception. But clear images retreat as language itself comes to the forefront of our attention. And just when our attention to the EVENT of language begins to falter, we fall through the words again into recognitions of the erotic, the political, our dire and fragile world. In a way, all the poems also involve translation (of Spanish, of geology, of interactions between child and parent, etc.). It's easy to be swept into Gander's orchestrations of rhythmic movements-with an intensifying sense of what? Human presence? Gravitas? I feel summoned toward a sharper intellectual and emotional awareness where I locate an intensified possibility of myself. The title gongs: Torn Awake.

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Eye Against Eye
Forrest Gander
Manufacturer: New Directions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Science & Steepleflower (New Directions Paperbook)

ASIN: 0811216357

Book Description

"Among the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman). The three long poems in Eye Against Eye convey the wrought particulars of intimate human relations, perceptions of the landscape, and the historical moment, tense with political exigencies. Mayan ruins invoke the collapsing Twin Towers, love between parents and child blister with tension, and a bicycle thief shatters the narcotic illusion of a private accord. Also contained is "Late Summer Entry," a series of poetic commentaries on Sally Mann's landscape photographs. Eye Against Eye, Forrest Gander's third book with New Directions, cries out an ethical concern for the ways we see each other and the world, the potential to share a vision that acknowledges our commonality. As always with Gander's poetry, suspensions and repetitions drive toward a complex emotional experience, evoking the multifaceted, multi-vocal surge of our present.

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