Mojave Ghost
Negotiating the terms of grief and time, Mojave Ghost, by Forrest Gander, creates an atmosphere suffused with intellectual rigor and emotional rawness. Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for the work Be With, an elegy for his late wife, poet C. D. Wright. Mojave Ghost is also about loss, this time his mother, who died during the pandemic.
The overwhelming weight endured from the loss of his wife and his mother is set in counterpoint against his own journal across the 800-mile-long course of the San Andreas Fault. Gander, a geologist by training, explains in his Author’s Note his own lifelong fascination with deserts and finding “myself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating my emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions, the fractures and folds that underlie not only my country, but any self in its relationship with others.”
During his journey he was accompanied “by a new immigrant to this country, Ashwini Bhat.” Bhat is a sculptor and installation artist. Eventually the two married. An immigrant and a Native American making the journey across an active American fault line seems like the beginning of a particularly crude joke. Yet Gander uses this trip as inspiration for creating a volume of poetry that observes nature, contemporary culture, and the lingering after-effects of grief.
Gander offers up observations that combine verbal concision with painterly images.
“Flayed by the paper cut of her scent in his memory.
“For her, it was home. This town
where various stirps [sic] of Christian
fundamentalism intersect
with unchecked retail sprawl.”
He encapsulates his own grief with an almost Nabokovian portrait of the contemporary Sun Belt. The brevity is reminiscent of haiku in saying so much with so little. The subtitle of Mojave Ghost is “A Novel Poem.” The brief book has passages arranged in brief one- or two-page “chapters.”
He also creates a mental ambiance that balances and plays against the word “novel” and its latent ambiguity. “Novel” can mean “book” or “fictional narrative.” It can also mean “new” or “unique.” Something to keep in mind, since New Directions has published this. New Directions is the home of avant-garde poetics, publishing everyone from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and beyond. Gander is at home with the groundbreaking Native American poets, everyone from New York City hipster-turned-Hollywood producer Tommy Pico to Jennifer Elise Foerster.
Later in the book, Gander says how “Time metamorphoses memories and buries them. There’s / no restitution. Gradually, they fold in on themselves, irretrievable.” It is how people and events become remembered and misremembered in oral histories. The eternal Now of social media and its tendency to become a cesspool of festering disinformation don’t help. Memory, like rock itself, can become erosion’s victim.
Mojave Ghost by Forrest Gander is a heroic quest against the inevitable challenges of loss, both personal and environmental. A futile attempt to offer meaning in a world rapidly being glutted by the meaningless. He asks,
“How do you sustain attentiveness? How to keep
the mind from dropping its needle
into the worn grooves of association?”
It is the constant battle of survivor’s guilt, a personal exhaustion combined with the addict’s desire for release, erasure, and oblivion. Memories create joy, but also pain, a pain one desires to go away, yet when it is gone, so are the memories. In a reversal of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, Gander states, “Meanwhile, the future blows towards us without handholds.”