Eye Against Eye [Paperback]

Forrest Gander (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: September 27, 2005

"Among the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman).

The three long poems in Eye Against Eye convey the wrought particulars of intimate human relations, perceptions of the landscape, and the historical moment, tense with political exigencies. Mayan ruins invoke the collapsing Twin Towers, love between parents and child blister with tension, and a bicycle thief shatters the narcotic illusion of a private accord. Also contained is "Late Summer Entry," a series of poetic commentaries on Sally Mann's landscape photographs. Eye Against Eye, Forrest Gander's third book with New Directions, cries out an ethical concern for the ways we see each other and the world, the potential to share a vision that acknowledges our commonality. As always with Gander's poetry, suspensions and repetitions drive toward a complex emotional experience, evoking the multifaceted, multi-vocal surge of our present.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Forrest Gander is the author of six books of poetry, various articles of literary criticism, and numerous translations. Besides winning a fellowship from the NEA, he has been the recipient of various awards including The Whiting Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative North American Writing, a Pushcart Prize, and the Jessica Nobel Maxwell Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review. He is presently Director of the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University, where he also teaches Comparative Literature.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (September 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811216357
• ISBN-13: 978-0811216357
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,117,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Terrific!, April 5, 2009

By 

DabblerArts (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eye Against Eye (Paperback)

A friend of mine lent me a copy of this book, and I had to buy my own copy. By far the best thing here is a sequence of poems facing b&w photos by Sally Mann. The descriptions and the poeticizing are truly gorgeous, without being obvious on the one hand, or nebulous on the other. The effects are also pleasingly varied; the poet seems inspired, not merely seeking novelty. I'll quote one passage, as example of the haunting beauty of these poems: "The depicted instant: a galvanic pre-storm eclipse. On a bridge, the photographer bends, shrouded behind her tripod. As she guesses the exposure time, lightning hisses and rips so close that the air, for seconds, isn't breathable. At once, the river quicksilvers. Its surface bulks and brightens. The heft of the scene, though, and the dynamic tension flee to the margins."

Somewhat less successful are three longish poems rounding out the book - a disjointed meditation on Mayan ruins, a wide-ranging evocation of our distracted age aptly called "Present Tense," and a dreamy retelling of the poet's brushing encounter with a bicycle thief in the Mission district of San Francisco. The first seems to me to err on the side of solemnity, with some questionable diction and some vague statements ("the exposure vesicles inward"; "The fragility of presence. A bird perched at the tip of a branch." etc). The second is lovingly written, but predictably unfocused; while the last is a tad sentimental. "Someone and someone's grief / careen around a corner," but the poet is very much himself, on vacation, as he is in the first instance perhaps. The writing is still lovely and resonant though.

I've ignored thus far the prelude poem and the page fillers called "ligatures," that in my opinion do little except to indulge in some fashionable postmodernistic poetics. Gander's gifts don't need that kind of credential, thank goodness; though it's no big deal, if it wins him more readers. (The friend who lent me this book is a real po-mo freak!) A very enjoyable book. Recommended!