Be With

Be With by Forrest Gander is a collection of elegy poems written about his partner who died suddenly in her sleep. The book explores aging and dementia and includes musings on photograms. New Directions published the book in 2018.

The book opens with the poem "Son." In the first couplet, the speaker says that it is not the mirror that is draped (part of a traditional mourning ritual) but the things the loved ones weren't able to say to the deceased. He asks why should he focus on how a body will "deploy to the myriad worm," when that concept oversimplifies the process of death. He calls this poetic tendency to refer to death by mentioning the decomposition of the body "Some kind of self-abasement." He adds that we have bacteria and parasites in and on our body all of the time, implying that worms consuming our carcasses isn't much different. Near the end of the poem, he addresses his son directly. He tells him that when his mother spoke, everyone was "transfixed," including the speaker. The last line reads, "Her one arterial child. It is just in you her blood runs."

Though the previous piece addressed his son, the next poem, "Beckoned," recalls the moment the speaker was forced to come to terms with his partner's death. First, he describes his "grief sounds" like a "drifting swarm of bees," at which point he faints. When he awakens, he goes on numbly, trying to avoid his friends. The next several lines begin with "At which point," signifying things were rapidly changing for the speaker all at once. He says that his partner's "voice was pinned to a backdrop of vaporous color," perhaps pointing out that she was no longer in her body and only existed as a spirit in his thoughts. He expresses that he grew old and fully felt the grief of her passing, that it was like "ripping open the beehive with my hands again." At the end of the poem, he begins imagining some conception of heaven (even though he truly doesn't believe it) just so that there can be some possibility of being with her.



In the unorthodox, two-part poem "Deadout," the speaker describes several melancholy scenes that give the impression of someone sitting alone with his feelings. He regards the naive "Youngbloods metaphorizing death" and recalls "Her scent: vinegar, zinc oxide, and hinoki cypress/He dreamed of it awake dreams of it." He cannot watch the shows they watched together, as it "Only makes his fillings ache." In part II, the same lines are used but are jumbled around creating a still-melancholy but chaotic poem.

Most of the poems follow this vein, tracing the path of the speaker's grief. After these, there are a few prose poems in a section called "Ruth" that examine the speaker's experience with his mother falling victim to dementia. Eventually, the speaker accepts this as another loss, feeling "akin to what a mother might feel for her child." He spends a lot of time detailing the aging process of his mother and recognizes her when he looks at himself in the mirror.

The last section’s title, "Littoral Zone,' refers to a part of a body of water that is nearshore where light penetrates just enough to support plant life. This section contains photograms by Michael Flomen. Photograms are photographs taken without a camera in which the photographer uses a light-sensitive material, such as photo paper, puts an object on it, and exposes it to light. Flomen leaves his photo paper in a natural environment, allowing the photograph to make itself. In the book, the poetry first reacts to the image and then begs questions of it.



The title of the book comes from a dedication that Gander's late partner, C.D. Wright, wrote in her posthumously published volume ShallCross. The dedication reads: "for Forrest / line, lank and long, / be with." Dan Chiasson of The New Yorker points out the subtle indications in the title: "The phrase is stripped of its object; the beloved has been ripped from the world. Reciprocity is suddenly broken, as though one player in a game had walked off the court in mid-volley."

In one interview, Gander admitted he was working on a poem in the volume when Wright died suddenly. The poem, originally a loose translation of a traditional ballad, shifts abruptly at that moment and becomes, like the other poems, about Gander's grief.

Gander's background in geology often appears in the book. He mentions several things from the natural world that might not be well-known to the reader, such as the littoral zone, helminth parasites, crocodile scute, and lechuguilla.



Forrest Gander is the A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University. He was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2012 and won a Pulitzer Prize for Be With in 2019.