What I’m Reading … Forrest Gander’s ‘Core Samples from the World,’ a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

“What I’m Reading” is a series about books I’m reading, which I may or may not review later

What I’m reading: Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 95 pp., $15.95, paperback), by Forrest Gander with photographs by Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide and Lucas Foglia

What it is: A 2011 poetry collection that includes haibun, a Japanese form that intersperses prose and haiku or haiku-like verse, often in a travel diary or journal. Core Samples from the World has poems about Chile, Mexico, China and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Why I’m reading it: I like haiku, and the book combines haibun with impressionistic black-and-white photographs. Haibun seems a fine metaphor for life: You have take a lot of prose to get a little poetry.

Sample lines: “Then they are whisked by van to the desert to witness the Kyrgyz version of a polo match, played with the decapitated carcass of a goat.” From the prose section of a haibun that describes a trip Gander took with other poets through Asia

Furthermore: Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the most recent National Book Critics Circle award for poetry, given on Thursday to Laura Kasischke’s Space, in Chains.

Read an excerpt from Core Samples from the World.

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© 2012 Janice Harayda
www.janiceharayda.com