Crossing Cultures and the Poetic Worlds of Forrest Gander, Thomas King, and Margaret Atwood

Abstract

Forrest Gander is a major American poet who crosses poetic, cultural, and linguistic bounds. This review article discusses the poetry and poetics of Gander in the context of two other poets, Thomas King and Margaret Atwood, providing a close reading of Gander’s Be With (2018), King’s 77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin (2019), and Atwood’s Dearly (2020). King, an Indigenous writer and scholar born and educated in the United States, and Atwood, some of whose ancestors lived in the American colonies and who had been a student at Radcliffe/Harvard, also have American experience. Poets may be rooted in the local and national, but they are also part of a comparative or world poetics. These poems express their beauty, understanding, and wisdom in a world too often devoid of poetry. Nature underwrites culture, and the natural world pervades these three collections, which also address human feeling, especially grief and loss.