Ghost Forest, by Jack B. Bedell
Mercer University Press, 2024
Review by Stephen A. Allen
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Jack B. Bedell’s latest collection presents us with a landscape of liminal spaces. The title poem—an ekphrastic take on a photograph, “Alhambra,” by Frank Rolle (which is reproduced as the cover image)—conjures up trees “Backlit by city and refinery’s glow” that grow “like hoary, Old Testament prophets // come down from the mountain / to rest in this body dump.” This is a place where “Water’s the only thing / that gets in . . . easily.” Can anything truly live in such conditions? There is “no frog bellow, / no heron flap—just moss.” Still, even here the moss waves and the waters rise, signs of a breath that survives in stillness. The forest may be a ghost, but it still keeps one foot (or root) in the world of the living, dwelling between realms. It is in such in-between spaces, inhabited by ghosts, swamp witches, and nature spirits, that Ghost Forest finds its voice.
There are many ghosts in this book, both named and unnamed. Of the five sections into which the poems are divided, four begin with addresses to specific spirits. The opening poem of the book, “Lines for Jean Rhys’s Ghost,” invokes a blessing on the spirit of novelist Jean Rhys:
May every window you pass let in
a light, Caribbean breeze, and on it
the voice of God floating
through a sentence you’re written.
The ghost of Tom Joad, on the other hand, is challenged instead of blessed in “Lines for Tom Joad’s Ghost”:
You tell me. How am I supposed
to show my sons and daughter
how dangerous it is to stare
into the flames?
These aren’t warming, communal campfire flames in question here, but the flames of violence of our contemporary moment: “a child / maced by a cop” or an SUV “set on fire in the middle / of intersections we’ve crossed / together.” In “Lines for Sonny Liston’s Ghost,” the boxer Sonny Liston, like Jean Ryhs, receives a benediction, a wish for him to find comfort after his early death: “May there be a slow song / wherever you’ve found yourself.” Finally, the wrestler Dick Murdoch is roped into a childhood memory that ends in a moment of suspension in “Lines for Dick Murdoch’s Ghost”:
You know, I don’t recall how that match
wound up. Last I remember, you had
that dude up for a brain buster
with nowhere to put him down.
Murdoch is also allowed his moment of rest, albeit ambiguously: “Have a cold brew, if there’s cold / where you are.”
While these four, named ghosts are generally presented as benign, or at least treated benignly, other spirits are treated more as something to be avoided. In “Gris-Gris,”
Even the wildest of beasts
stay clear of the stench
memories leave in abandoned
spaces.
The animals may explore such spaces for food or dig up the yard, but once they have gone, “nature always leaves these ghosts / to grass and the slow return of trees.” A sinister spirit on the nature side of things can be found in “Limitrophe, with Cairns.” In this poem, a line of man-created stone cairns divides the swampland from the tree line, seemingly creating a solid barrier in a liminal zone, “but that night / wind blew water inland from the Gulf,” covering the rocks. When the water retreats, it leaves
a smell so hairy you could
almost see its arms full of flat rocks,
its red eyes fading into the tree trunks
like warnings you’d have to cross a line to read.
This is the smell of the wild waters meeting land, to be avoided by humans as surely as the smell of memories is avoided by animals.
There are other ghosts, too, more neutral and more welcome, traces of another world. The titular bird of the prose poem “Ghost Heron” may actually be just that: an “old soul” who “wakes in the top of its cyprus tree, beak tucked under wing.” The landscape it flies over seems unfamiliar: “Water has seeped into everything, though, and it’s difficult for memories to stand up tall enough to be counted.” In the end, the bird achieves physicality by being observed by a family over breakfast, but this observation is conditional on it not acknowledging being observed: “Even a stolen glance would turn this body to mist, and the whole cycle would have to be learned again, with new bones, earth to sky.” The following poem, “Ghost Fishing,” also in prose, involves another spirit who might disappear under close observation: “But right there on the arm of the sofa is the ghost of his dead father waiting for him to clear the bannister.” As the “him” of the poem eats his bowl of midnight cereal, the fatherly ghost fills his mind with memories of a childhood fishing expedition, an expedition of plenty: “Just grinning like the whole catch was a big, black top hat with a bottom so deep and full there’d be no end to any of it.”
Along with ghosts, liminal spaces attract liminal people, as is seen in the central section of the book: a sequence (previously published as a chapbook by Belle Point Press) about a swamp witch, Kate Mulvaney. A reclusive figure, Mulvaney belongs to the swamp, and the swamp belongs to her: “Since the day she stepped off the road into it, / she has known how the swamp breathes” (“Kate Mulvaney Dreams of Breath”). Her interactions with others, as described in “Kate Mulvaney in Maurepas,” are mainly confined to healing and sorcery, given sparingly:
People will visit her as long as they feel pain.
She will coat their shriven brows
with fish blood, juice of grasshoppers.
When the waters off her dock turn brackish, she will
bolt her doors.
Even at the end of her life, Mulvaney is one with her environment, one of its ghosts: going “into the swamp, not through the trees/but straight into them, and down” (“Kate Mulvaney’s Last Breath”).
Ghost Forest is inhabited, as one would expect, by ghosts, as well as nature spirits and quasi-mythical creatures, but only the occasional human. For some, this might make it a difficult book to enter into fully: without people with whom to identify, or who can at least be recognized as familiar, a certain personal element may seem lacking. But there are other ways in. The landscape of swamplands and waterways is a powerful character in its own right, and if the reader can learn to identify with it, the inhabitation of liminal spaces becomes possible. There may still be some distance and danger, as in the poem “Demonym”:
The swamp
loves to keep secrets
and its ghosts are only there
to dance. They won’t care one bit.
But by entering into the landscape, by imaginatively becoming one with it, new mindscapes open up, and the secrets of the swamp come to be less distant, although the danger can still be there. The ghosts of the wetlands may not care one bit for you, but you might find yourself caring for them, and in this age of climate disasters and impending environmental doom, that is no small thing.
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Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His latest collections are Ghost Forest (Mercer University Press, 2024), Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022), Color All Maps New (Mercer University Press, 2021), Rock Garden (Daily Drunk Press, 2021), and No Brother, This Storm (Mercer University Press, 2018).
Stephen A. Allen was born in Vermont and currently lives in Michigan. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and also studied poetry at Amherst College and the University of Notre Dame while pursuing unrelated degrees. His poetry has appeared most recently in Northern New England Review, Notre Dame Review, and Rattle.
ID: Cover of Ghost Forest by Jack B. Bedell.
Psaltery & Lyre 