Image by Josh Hild.
As we face the abyss that is, and will be, the human future, Forrest Gardner’s new book Mojave Ghost (New Directions) takes us through the abyss that is the present. Gardner, a rare poet, puts words to humanity, never allowing the human animal’s human being to be shackled by pure joy or pure pain. Here, we struggle with the actuality pain and joy, also wanting to first say the world before conjuring the world.
“Not to interpret. To feel like course through you.” Gardner proposes in his book that we struggle to embody some sort of stable existence in this world that we live in, and particularly along the 800-mile San Andreas fault and in the time of his birth. That we are empty, or perhaps full of questions and miscomprehensions. As opposed to the life of certitudes that modernism and post-modern life promise. 
Is Gardner the Mojave Ghost? Yes and no. “I borrowed my brightness from her. Where is it now?” “You are the love of my life. No you are the love of your life.” The narrator is certainly empty, or perhaps full of doubt, which makes him a ghost. And not a human? There in lies the power of this book, a book with a political power that many social science books simply do not have. Any politics, the politics of frustration, humiliation, of justice, or whatever else must root itself in human being. What is a politics that is not embodied? That cannot be embodied .. A series of impossible lies the western text Plato’s Republic tells us, to uphold a reality.
These questions, however, make this narrator human. Perhaps by accepting this questioning, the author accepts what is missing, and seeks new humanity, as a being that is partly ghost but human enough to make a poem out of reality.
“Perceptions of the world / oscilaltes in and out / of referential focus ..” as “the finer pleas and raw cries of pain / he was eliciting from those he loved didn’t reach him” says it all: if the ’40s had Mersault, the 70’s and the birth of the new right Toni Morrison’s Sula, the Mojave ghost emerges to tell our times, as our times.
“And to find myself in a shell / jacket and approach-shoes strolling past boulders on the xeric canyon path limmed with mustard flowers as though it were a garden / as though I’d never drawn those distinction / that separate me out.” This ghost is confused and troubled by the confusion that the present causes it.
The ghost is more than a person, it is a region. In “this town / where various stirps of Christian fundamentalism intersect / with unchecked retail sprawl” what has happened to human life, and to all life? Full stop. What happens to love in such a place. Is it made impossible, improbable, hard as shit, in such a place.
“Someone has spray-painted two arrows / in opposite directions across the road / to let the earthquake / know which way / to go”. In a few words, the times we live in. The author tells us that he feels his mother as a ghost in the Mojave Desert, and that after the loss of his wife CD Wright he has gone back to the place, the 800 miles around the San Andres Fault, which is the setting of Mojave Desert. Loss of mother, of self, of wife, ground this book of powerful poetry, that in the end reminds us that the land is not lost. It’s come time to walk the lands that inhabit ourself in search of renewal, in geological time.
