Deeds of Utmost Kindness
A haunting and peculiar travelogue, Deeds of the Utmost Kindness employs forms as diverse as haiku and prose poetry in settings that range from Japan to the rural Ozarks to contemporary Moscow. The compelling strangeness of the poems' precise details exposes varied rhythms of thought and illustrated how different logics work in the metaphoric structures of changing places. Yet behind the uneasy sense of dislocation felt by the constant traveler lies the personal, essentially moral, voice of the poet as observer.
“Gander’s poems fix flights of mind from lovemaking to landings to stunning minutiae. Here, there: Kyoto, Kentucky, and Arkansas - ‘a Quapaw word. It means handsome man.’ Gander can write masculine lines focused on feminine inventions sensuous as ‘mouthlight.’ A sound master, his music uses dissonance, too: “footsucking weedlots,’ ‘Chalkstrokes of last crickets.’ Eros presides over these generous poems that ring with the wonderous names of lowly things.”
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Reviews
“Whether in a portrait of someone being hit by cars while working on the highway or a country boy driving his pickup, there is an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality [to the poems in Deeds of Utmost Kindness.]”
“Gander’s poems fix flights of mind from lovemaking to landings to stunning minutiae. Here, there: Kyoto, Kentucky, and Arkansas - ‘a Quapaw word. It means handsome man.’ Gander can write masculine lines focused on feminine inventions sensuous as ‘mouthlight.’ A sound master, his music uses dissonance, too: “footsucking weedlots,’ ‘Chalkstrokes of last crickets.’ Eros presides over these generous poems that ring with the wonderous names of lowly things.”
“In his new collection, Deeds of Utmost Kindness, Forrest Gander tests the limits of poetic acceleration well beyond the means of genre . . . . For Gander, meaning is an exact, if momentary, place. It is also an exacting one, surcharged with perils of sexuality, violence, and all such fires. Certainly, his sharp sense of place has made him the most earthy of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson.”