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. ... Read more

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.
... Read more

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) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"A New Range of Feeling"
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
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. ... Read more

Book Description

Amazon.com
There's a lustrous assurance to Forrest Gander's poems, as if each onewere 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":

But the clarity
of the word "is"
is a deception.

Customer Reviews (2)

"The audacious originality of the ordinary..."
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 realizedthat I was "reading" along a rocky, bouldered watercourse.It was likeexperiencing manifestations of "other" inside the confining condition ofbeing "other," or "manifest," oneself.Or, like trying to see red with ared gel (mylar film) one one's eyeglasses.

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

I don't experience thepoetry of Science and Steepleflower, however, as having "arrived," ashaving reached any particular point along a continuum.Rather, as inPicasso's portraits, these poems look at "reality" from multipleperspectives, and simultaneously.That activitiy is, in itself, theepiphany or transformation for the writer/reader.In ordinary states ofconsciousness, we tend to take single perspectives, consider singularevents, singular meanings, and generally come down on one side or anotherof a dialectic.We are rarely content to hover in potentiality,possibility, and contingency, more often wanting resting places ofsynthesis, resolution, articulated meaning that takes on the gloss of fact. As Gander says in "Knife on a Plate," "A donkey finds a magic pebble.Thereferents / 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 notime has passed".

So, how do we hear and see the world through all of ourown racket and clutter, our own noise and debris?I listen to this uncannyphrase from "Duration and Simultaneity":"The cicada collapses its owneardrum, 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 shuttingdown "self-perception," I shut down "other-perception," unlike the cicada,who appears to have a more selective eardrum!I (often) imagine that myown "song" and the "song" of everything/everyone else are distinct, evenautonomous entities...when in fact, they are enmeshed in a matrix ofsameness 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 storiesabout the world, my likes and dislikes, that drown out awareness of all theother "songs" of the world. I make up so many stories, look sofrantically for the unusual and unknown to stimulate myself in the midst ofthe auditory and visual racket I create.If only, as Gander writes in"Knife on a Plate," I could more often know that "The / audaciousoriginality of the ordinary / sometimes suggests an opening / and to enteris to hear the measure / not of nostalgia but nearness-that fetching / lackof doubt and perspective, a world / zoomed-in close / enough to count theblack ants / under dog-stunted spirea...There is disturbance like a kiss /through which cognition disappears."Now, after all this mentalcud-chewing on Forrest's poetry, I haven't even hinted at the incrediblyerotic trances this book invokes...(August 8, 1998)

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

Book Description
Word count: 1408. ... Read more

Book Description

Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the United States and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico's National Fund for Culture and the Arts have joined together to support a proposed three-year program of anthology publication and public outreach activities. In the first year, Sarabande has been named publisher of the poetry anthologies.

"We are pleased to introduce readers to the best of contemporary Mexican and American poetry through these comprehensive bilingual anthologies," states National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. "I believe they will quickly become essential volumes for poetry lovers and grant new insight into both cultures."

Contributors include: David Huerta, Alberto Blanco, Coral Bracho, Ricardo Castillo, Vicente Quirarte, Rafael Vargas, Alicia Garcia Bergua, Fabio Morabito, Silvia Tomasa Rivera, Myriam Moscona, and more.

Customer Reviews (1)

An anthology of contemporary poetry by a variety of Mexican authors
Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico is an anthology of contemporary poetry by a variety of Mexican authors. Each poem is presented in its original Spanish and in English translation, and cover a broad variety of themes in this compilation ideal for classroom study or private reading. Authors represented include Elsa Cross, Francisco Hernandez, Jose Luis Rivas, Alberto Blanco, and many more. Approximately four to six of each author's brief poems are showcased in this eclectic anthology that reflects the energetic spirit of Mexican poetry. "Dispersion": I rip off this Persian robe / and lots petals fly / around the room. // Nevertheless, the fallen colors, / my naked body, / shivering, / reminds me of dispersion. // The stars / pierce with anise the dark sky. / I see myself melt away in God's abyss / and not in your arms.
... Read more

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.

Book Description
A brilliantly translated bilingual edition of poems by one of Mexico's foremost woman poets.

Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published half a dozen books of poems including the groundbreaking El ser que va a morir (1982) which changed the course of Mexican poetry. Her exquisite long-lined poems evoke the sensual realm where logic is disbanded, wonder evoked. In the words of her translator Forrest Gander, "Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound....Bracho's poems make sense first as music, and music propels them."

From her early collections—Bajo el destello liguido and El ser—to her most recent books La voluntad del ámbar and Ese espacio, ese jardìn (which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize), Firefly under the Tongue offers the first book of English translations by this most important and influential living poet. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on March 22, 2000. The length of the article is 1876 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Trinity Fields.
Author: Forrest Gander
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2000
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: 20Issue: 1Page: 87

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description

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. ... Read more

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.

Customer Reviews (15)

what's the big deal?
This would be my first introduction to Pablo Neruda, and I must say I'm a bit disappointed. Not that Neruda isn't a great poet, the Nobel Prize and critical acclaim prove the contrary, but perhaps the translation could use some more work.

I picked this copy up noticing the name of Robert Hass', the translator and author of the Essential Haiku, on which he did a great job. Unfortunately, Eisner is the editor of the majority of the poems. The analogy to Eisner's translation would be like what Zondervan did to the bible in their NIV. It's not a bad translation, but it's moderned up a bit. I would have appreciated a more King James-like translation of Neruda's poems as I could infer a lot of missed nuances that appear to be in the original Spanish on the opposite page. A lot of the translations lack the depth and texture of what a great poet should have, and sometimes it feels like I'm reading a different poet altogether.

For instance, a line "Hermano, hermano!" is translated as "Hermano, hermano!" in the English, though it could have plainly been have translated as "Brother, brother!" considering the second "hermano" is not capitalized. Perhaps this was Neruda's original intent,but there is no way to tell as there are no footnotes.

Poetry is about texture, a poet's voice, and brilliance in how the artist uses his words to paint; this translation doesn't do enough to convey the voice of Neruda, but merely makes it accessible to new readers of not only Neruda, but also poetry.

A New Translation
"I became saturated with his poetry and began to translate his poems. Although there were many beautiful existing translations, many others did not flow as I felt they should and I often had interpretive differences with them." ~ Mark Eisner, translator

"The Essential Neruda Selected Poems" is the best translation I've read so far. The words are alive with beauty in a way that feels authentic to the heart. You can immerse yourself in the poems and emerge with a sense of wonder.

"Leaning into the evenings I throw my sad nets
to your ocean eyes."

Mark Eisner has captured the soul of Pablo Neruda's art and perhaps even enhanced the creative majesty of each poem. At times the poems can make you feel a little breathless as if you have happened upon a new discovery or secret revelation.

"And the air came in with orange-blossom fingers
over all those asleep:
a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,
of blue wind, of iron cordillera,
that were like soft hurricanes of footsteps
polishing the lonely boundary of the stone."

The imagery is at times so vivid, as if you were transported to each scene. Pictures flash across your mind and you can almost catch the scent of the ocean or see the colors vivid and pure. Angels and death dance through the poems with equal ease and at times the words are heavenly or earthy and dark.

"Full woman, carnal apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure clarity opens between your columns?
What ancient night does man touch with his senses?"

If you are new to the poems of Pablo Neruda then this would be an excellent place to start. The poems present many facets of the poet unlike other books that simply reveal his romantic nature. While I seem to enjoy his love poems best, I can say that this experience gives a more wide-ranging portrait of Pablo Neruda.

~The Rebecca Review

The Essential Neruda
Neruda has given us some of the most incredibly poignant poetry of our time. Do yourself a favor; buy this collection.

Love on your mind?Read TWENTY LOVE POEMS: 15 --- "I like it when you're quiet."



"I like it when you're quiet.It's as if you weren't here now, and you heard me from a distance, and my voice couldn't reach you.

It's as if your eyes had flown away from you, as if your mouth were closed because I leaned to kiss you."

The title of the collection says it all "The Essential Neruda."

Gracias a la Vida de Pablo!
M.Eisner has compiled an elegant presentation of the profound Pablo's soulful echo. The translations are smooth and majestic. He has clearly discovered the light radiating from Neruda's heart. Thank you for this lovely red poppy edition!

Lovely Collection of Poetry
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! ... Read more