Science & Steepleflower (New Directions Paperbook)
There's a lustrous assurance to Forrest Gander's poems, as if each one   were a solution to a problem the poet had worked out before he wrote a word.  With his third book,Science & Steepleflower, Gander also proves  that he is among the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation.  The collection is remarkable for its mixture of forms and sheer immediacy.  And the titles alone are proof of the author's philosophical  ambition--there's "Duration and Simultaneity," "The History of Manifest  Destiny," and "Deflection Toward the Relative Minor":But the clarityof the word "is"is a deception.Often Gander uses the equivalent of a wide-angle lens to examine the  connection between the subject and its context. "Exhaustible Appearance,"  written in response to a photograph, begins: "Around the burning barn,  stationary objects seem to stream. / Scrub brush, twigs in sinople dirt,  dry weeds, / puffballs among scattered breccia and chert." Yes, the  vocabulary is rather recondite. But as R.P. Blackmur pointed out in a  famous essay on Wallace Stevens, a phrase like "the moonlight fubbed the  girandoles" is perfectly comprehensible if you have a dictionary at hand.  And in Gander's case, his esoteric lexicon draws attention not only to  itself but to the hardscrabble landscape it describes. This is reality, he  seems to be saying--even if you have to look it up.--Mark Rudman