Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Certainly his clearest and most accessible, this taut and memorable sixth outing from Gander (Science & Steepleflower) may also be his breakout work. One of its four mid-length poems describes ten beautiful photographs by Sally Mann (also reproduced here), emphasizing their spiritual resonance as well as their technical flair: in a misty picture of a half-destroyed tree, "at the border between a tangible and an intangible world, life climbs onto death's shoulders." The other three mid-length poems flaunt narrative components: "Burning Towers, Standing Wall" (its title an allusion to 9/11 and to W. B. Yeats) examines Mayan architecture in Mexico, turning the visible stones, their "mutilated stelae" and "rubbed out glyphs," into a plea for patience in the face of violence, and there are deliberate and ambitious poems on the North American landscape. Perhaps the most powerful parts of this powerful volume are four prose poems called "Ligatures," reactions to difficult moments in the poet's family life, and in the life of his teenage son: here even the hardest domestic conflicts finally promise emotional reward, "as if inside experience, bright with meaning, there were another experience, pendant, unnamable." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In his latest collection, Gander (Science & Steepleflower) asks questions concerning the things "which divide what and what once," that is, what was and what is now. The stunning opener, "Burning Towers, Standing Wall," compares the building of a Mayan wall and its destruction-both from political and natural forces-to the collapse of the Twin Towers. In three long poems, linked with pieces that contrast a couple's relationship with a boy's budding adolescence, the reader is asked to regard the relationships between words and subjects: "I am not given a subject but am given to my subject"; "Not the sentence is for the words but the words are for the sentence." Throughout, Gander's language is diverse, almost scientific (aigrette, mafic), yet onomatopoeic ("perwicka perwicka/ of a quetzal in flight") and often sensual ("stars some speak softly"); his syntax is musical and eclectic. Language plays to the ears and nose, senses with the capacity to evoke memory, that "thin memorial ache." Owing to the poems' placement and the near absence of punctuation, the reader is propelled through the verse, left with a sense of urgency and awe, not unlike the man in the last poem who witnesses the theft of a bicycle but finds himself powerless to stop it: "the world shifts/ along a hairline crack/ you can't tell/ what is happening/ until it moves on and is gone/ as someone and someone's grief/ careen around the corner." Recommended for collections with an emphasis in postmodern and experimental work.-Karla Huston, Appleton Art Ctr., WI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
