Mojave Ghost by Forrest Gander (New Directions Publishing) – Reviewed by Vikki C.

Mojave Ghost is a sensuous, layered meditation on the kaleidoscopic nature of the temporal and innate entanglement of self and Earth. Tracing sections of the 800-mile route along the San Andreas fault to the small town of his birthplace in the Mojave Desert, Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander pays personal homage to a lifetime of convergence and departures, perceptively voiced through mappings of rugged external terrain alongside desire's own expanse and faultlines. 

The blend of flowing narrative and shorter, distilled vignettes embody the poet's nuanced and evolving landscape, where what is longed for is gleaned — in cameos of intimacy, geological rifts and the natural microcosms perishing before us. These poems are at once grounding and enlightening – the poet's "beloved" envisioned as both female lover and facets of the elusive landscape that surround. Visions of beauty one hopes to prolong — to preserve in the face of climate change, crisis and life's vulnerabilities:

"But here, you said, at the time of our intrusion, / you said this zone here is not one of the earth's sentences / but an overdub of stutters..."

(…)

"you said here, and you watched me / as the taste, part you part earth, brought a change to my face." 

Gander’s lines signpost paths of affirmation whilst also pointing to precarious and challenging terrain. Spaces of inquiry into paradox, aging and our labour towards revelation. He brings a constant assessment of self which allows for no easy resolution. That ultimately we move towards death with a quiet reverence. That the arresting beauty we witness in the shifting light on canyons, in the delicate shadows of a Joshua tree, in pale, patterned fossils...is the same beauty that breaks us down with a certain faith. 

“The fissures / run through everything, even through / my remaining years — which I can count, probably, / on my fingers.” 

(…)

“What / is left of experience that hasn’t / been measured? 

(…)

“As I continue my descent / along the canyon’s seam. As I sip / and hold a quick breath. As I slip from sight / into a chimney of rock.”

Mojave Ghost is full of honest observations on the fragile roots of relationships: between a man and woman, between Man and Earth, life and death. It extends a genuine spiritual hand to cross the unknowable. An invitation to feel for that humbling foothold over what has been irredeemably ruptured. Through this consummate poet, we grow attuned to another way of loving, buried beneath the visible…closer to the edge of both death and imagination — yet so ineffably free.

Mojave Ghost is published by New Directions Publishing and is available on Amazon.