Forrest Gander Books

Gorgeous work. Neruda is my all time favorite. A beautiful book to give as a gift or to get some started with Neruda.

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!

"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

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.

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."

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*

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)

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.

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.

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.