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Biographical note:  Forrest Gander is the author of five poetry books, including Science & Steepleflower and Torn Awake (both from New Directions). His most recent books of translation include No shelter: Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and (with Kent Johnson) Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. His essays have appeared widely in such journals as The Nation and The Boston Review. With degrees in geology and English, he is Director of the Graduate Program in Literary Arts and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Biographical note:  Rikki Ducornet is the author of two short-story collections, five books of poetry, and seven novels, including The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition and Gazelle. She is also a painter whose work has been exhibited widely. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710454
ISBN-10:  1844710459
ISBN-13:  9781844710454
Author:  Forrest Gander
Title:  The Blue Rock Collection
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-04
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The author’s training as a geologist influences the themes and forms of the poems and the single essay in this book. Often his poetic forms are determined by rock characteristics, even when the concerns of the poem are intensely human. For instance, a poem about a set of perceived relationships at twilight from the Crystal section titled “yellow quartz” breaks into six lines and references the passage of light because quartz crystals are pellucid and hexagonal. In another sequence, “Line of Descent,” sharply shifting lines of poetry enact the cutbacks and bends of the path into the Grand Canyon by which father and son descend through lines of sediment and lines of story along the bloodline that ties them together. Without calling attention to themselves, such forms underpin the strong emotional terrain upon which all the poems, whether focused on erotic love, fatherhood, the histories of empire, or the dialogue between scientific rationalism and poetic imagination, are situated. With an eye toward what we stand on literally, Gander concentrates our attention toward what we stand on and for in our various relationships with others and with the world

Table of contents:
Pastoral
Line of Descent
The Blue Rock Collection
Igneous
Metamorphic
Crystals
Sedimentary
Terms
Field Guide to Southern Virginia
Facing in All Directions
Coda: About the Second Circle
A Poetic Essay on Creation, Evolution, and Imagination

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Excerpt from book:  

from Field Guide to Southern Virginia

***

True as the circumference
to its center. Woodscreek Grocery,
Rockbridge County. Twin boys
peer from the front window, cheeks
bulging with fireballs. Sandplum trees
flower in clusters by the levee. She
makes a knot on the inside knob
and ties my arms up
against the door. Williamsburg green.
With a touch as faint as a watermark.
Tracing cephalon, pygidium, glabella.

Review quote:  It isn’t long before the ethereal quality of these poems [in Torn Awake] begins to remind you of similar effects in the work of T. S. Eliot and the 17th century Anglo-Welsh mystic Henry Vaughan … The voices vary throughout this book’s six highly speculative sequences … yet again and again they call from their spectral airiness a single recurring image, an elemental configuration of man, woman and child. Indeed the book ends with a consideration of just such a threesome frozen forever in the aftermath of an earthquake on ancient Cyprus, with the speaker proposing that such a piteous sight can be taken as either a story with no meaning or a meaning beyond story. In the midst of such questioning, the only reality is the poet’s unflinchingly curious mind.

David Kirby
The New York Times Book Review

Review quote:  Geologic codes, discoveries, plains, and entrances, Forrest Gander’s long poems, transforming their language into imagery that bristles with energy.

Ray González
The Bloomsbury Review