Eye Against Eye
/ with photographs by Sally Mann
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 blisters 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.
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Reviews
Reviewed for The Great American Pinup
Reviewed for The Chicago Review
Reviewed for Cutbank
Reviewed for So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art
Reviewed for Best of 2005: Poetry Picks
Reviewed for Talisman
Reviewed for Library Journal
Reviewed for Publishers Weekly
Reviewed for Dragonfire
Reviewed for Third Factory
Reviewed for American Poet
Reviewed for Galatea Resurrects
Reviewed for The Providence Journal
Discussed in The Modern Review
“A book of daring and maturity, both adventurous and intimate.”
“A powerful book that enhances Gander’s oeuvre by adding to its range.”
“A splendid compendium of neologisms…and uncommon words…and geological terms.”
“Forrest Gander is a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly experimental writer.”
“Gander’s [poems] plunge and swoop up and down the whole scale of earthy, earthly, cerebral, and celestial experience.”
“He insinuates a knotty, digressive intensity that is fully his own.”
“Perhaps the most powerful parts of this powerful volume are four prose poems called Ligatures.”