This unique collection deserves, and requires, many readings so that its profundity and beauty may be fully absorbed and appreciated.
The ideology of Sangam literature underpins the whole of Your Nearness. Sangam – which translates as ‘gathering’, ‘meeting’, ‘fraternity’- strives to transcend boundaries of time and space and involves a gathering of individuals united in spirit, sharing a common vision and seeking meaning and purpose in a state of togetherness. If there are differences, they only enhance the spirit of Sangam.
An essential aspect of Sangam poetics is its focus on an inner realm. ‘Nature’ corresponds with the inner landscape of an individual and extends beyond itself to become a metaphor of the mind. Two sections of Your Nearness are called ‘Sangam Acoustics’. The scholar, N. Manu Chakravarthy, describes them as ‘the blossoming of the Sangam consciousness’ which resonates in India and in the Californian landscape through motifs of ‘Sea, Mountain, Pastoral, Forest and Wasteland’ which reveal ‘the confluence of the interior and exterior’.
There are environmental concerns in Your Nearness. ‘Wasteland’ depicts a futuristic scene of grimness. Man, says Gander, has lost his ‘cadence’ and will regret his ‘petty-righteous cruelties’ revealed, for example, when the neem tree is ‘without blossoms’. What will it be like, he asks
If local animals make themselves nocturnal to avoid you, if swarms
of laughing thrushes no longer descend from the summit …
… if this orange lichen – gossiping across borders – blackens,
curls, and goes silent? (‘In the Mountains’)
It is lichen which provides the central and all-encompassing motif of Your Nearness – lichen which is the synergistic alliance of a fungus and algae or cyanobacteria, lichen which does not grow in polluted land, which is collaborative and transformative so that through asexual reproduction the original organisms, whose merging involves a mutual alteration, are changed utterly.
And it is through lichen, as Forrest Gander feels and describes it, that love and identity combine and embrace. In ‘Twice Alive’ the landscape of nature and the landscape of intimacy are so entwined that the entranced reader also becomes part of the ongoing metamorphosis. (The passages in italics that show the journey are my own).
In this scene there is a combination of moss, perfume, skin, memory and lichen:
I crush oak moss between finger and thumb
for its sweet perfume persistent on
your skin when I touch your throat, so slow
to evaporate, the memory of seeing
sunburst lichen on the sandstone cliff’
presently
evening finds us at this woods’ edge where
at a dead oak’s base
shoestring-rot glimmers, its luminescent
rhizomes reflected from the eyes
of a foraging racoon that doesn’t yet sense us
air ghostly and damp clings
as we step from our woods
to look across the field towards the first
lane of lit houses, their dull pewter
auras restrained by wet haze
and here we have the total merging of fungi, rain, slime, the beloved’s brown eyes and a sense of mystery and unease
cordyceps – the brown of your eyes softened
with rain and remotely fluorescent – dissolve
into slime after a few days, whatever we thought
we were following was following us, its
intention linked to our own
Many of the most beautiful poems about intimacy in Forrest Gander’s Your Nearness are about this mingling of cells. Here is two verses from ‘Unto Ourselves: to See What’s There’. For me they sum up all the universality, the inner and outer landscapes, the fusing and merging, the transformations:
Across the cytoplasm of adjacent cells
goes a signal that turns you towards me, turns
me into you. We are coupled in quiet
tumult, convergent arguments, an alien
rhythm becoming familiar …
Because excess is what it took
for us to transform, to effulge. You cast
your life beyond itself. Can’t you sense me
within your ecstatic openess
like rain mingling with red earth?
Without you I survived and with you
I live again in radical augmentation
of identity because we have
effaced our outer limits, because
we summoned each other. In you,
I cast my life beyond itself.
A number of Forrest Gander’s own photographs enhance this finely presented collection. But no review can do justice to the depths of language and spirituality in Your Nearness. Such insights deserve time for participation and sharing. To use the poet’s own word, everything is ‘combinatory’.
Mandy Pannett 28th July 2024
