Trout Fishing in Georgia: a review of Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear by Gary Grossman. Arroyo Seco Press. 2025. $16. paper.
Gary Grossman starts his day with dark roast coffee. He jogs in and around the college campus in Athens, Georgia, where he lives. His art reflects his life. Professor Emeritus of Animal Ecology, he is erudite. His knowledge of animals, plants, and fish is extensive. He is irked at finding tiny holes moths have made in a favorite T shirt, and pleased by feeling the tug of a fish on a line in a “50 degree trout stream (bravely) wearing pants rather than waders” (71). In his love of nature he is like the poet Mary Oliver, and in his proclivity to science, like the twentieth century poet A. R. Ammons. In his poems as in his life he is his own person. Three things to note in the poems in this new collection are their originality of metaphors, sensuality of imagery, and particularity of voice. Some writers who are erudite sound aloof. Not so here, not at all.
To talk of metaphor is also to talk of a poem’s metaphorical resonance. In “Bare Bones,” the poem that begins the collection, trees seen at night in November, namely “White and red oak, mockernut hickory, and yellow poplar” (2) are likened to the human skeletal frame, and then taken a step further: trees are likened to people, and succinctly ascribed human attributes. Trees, like people, “reach / for both the sky and each other” (2). Toward the end of the book, a subtler metaphor is at work, that of fishing. Two men are in a gym; one asks the other if he’ll be going to the funeral of a mutual acquaintance. The other says no. The grit of the poem lies in the asker’s reaction. He seems to flounder like a fish out of water, and the language, with its succession of stressed syllables and trochaic rhythms mimics that reaction. “He cocked his liver-spotted head / to the left, mouth, now opening and closing” (85). Both men seem indignant. “You mean you’re not going!” “No, I’m not going!” The reader’s catharsis stems from the friction between the two men. The reader learns why the one asked is not going. He and the deceased, though in frequent close proximity, were never friends. He “reached out,” cast his line in those waters, but, from the now deceased, never got so much as a nibble on that metaphorical line. The poem ends as it began, with the two men in the gym.
Glancing at a now vacant weight-bench, I tried to reel
him back in—we weren’t any kind of friends you know,
just two people who worked on the same floor for years (85).
The vehicle is the momentary friction at the gym; the tenor is the emotional distance, the estrangement, the silence that arises in an array of situations that comprise daily life.
Grossman’s encyclopedic and empirical knowledge of earth, water, and sky, is extensive. Nomenclatures of the natural world are part of his everyday discourse. Thus, he is able to render entities of nature in all their vitality. Talking about carrots he describes “the scent of ripeness / hovering over the bed of orange, red / and purple heads poking up through / a roof of crushed pine bark” (12). Worms are food for birds. “The Mockingbird and the Worm” is rendered from the perspective of both the bird and the worm. The line “slithering through fescue” (24) is emblematic of the poem’s visceral aspect, as is the line “as I shake my wings dry” (24). The poem that follows it, “Nest Failure” begins
Every March our resident Wrens
botch their nest-making, building on
the four by four inch cross-tie under
the side-porch roof. Get it right I tell
these feathered golf balls, who already
have fled — a blurred beam of burnt sienna (25)
The accent falls on “building on,” the progressive tense, the continuum of the Wrens’ nesting and flight. There is continuum in “Leaf Out” as well. “Running downhill, through muted / air, I hear each new leaf snap / open” (31). He sees “a just opened sapphire iris” (31), before turning around to run toward his starting point. In “Picking Figs,” the speaker must compete with blue jays that “ruin pounds of figs because some cerebral pathology has them peck each fruit” (55). And in “Just Fallen Leaves” he observes “a geometric collage atop a frosted concrete canvas: magenta and crimson, paling to tepid beige” (81). Like the fallen leaves the sky is a palate of colors; and nature, which decays, also pulses with sensuality.
As it should be, this poet’s voice is particular. First and foremost, it is the voice of a human being who observes, remembers, forgets, complains, praises, regrets, laments, hopes, prays, and empathizes with other human beings. A voice in which listeners hear continuum. In “Tante Sophie’s Schnapps Glasses” he says,
Holding a cup to the light, I see
embedded sooty specks — remnants
of the 1890’s when Cossacks sacked
Sophie’s town in the Pale of Settlement —
she escaped, to Syracuse, New York (66).
“Obituary” (42) a poignant tribute to the poet’s mother; “How to Crush a Car” (57) an understated account of the exclusion his Jewish grandfather experienced from mid-twentieth century society in Georgia; “Missing” (84), a reference to his wife’s visit to San Francisco to be with her ailing sister; and “Driving Rachel to Sleep: October 1994” (70), a tender memory from his daughter’s childhood; all are significant attributes to Grossman’s voice. In the title poem, “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear,” it expresses regret. “My casual remark that unknowingly wounds a friend, / who parks her heart on the den mantle next to her son’s urn” (82). It also evokes humor. There are a couple of poems in which he talks about Zoom meetings that are falling-down funny. Then there’s this situation: he’s in a car with others, they are trying to get into a restaurant, but every space in the parking lot is full, save for one, and in it some guy is doing Tai Chi, quite oblivious to their need for a parking space and food.
Gary Grossman, a devotee of the Jewish faith, is a son, a grandson, a husband, a father of daughters; one a veterinarian, the other a neuroscientist. He jogs alone and with others; he wrestles with fitted bedsheets, listens to running toilets, observes turnips and onions, and remembers where he came from. “Underwater” (41) is a recollection from childhood of living in three foster homes. On a different note, no other poet can boast of being gifted a case of wine from Nick Hughes, the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Plath and Hughes aside, with their distinct voices (Nick and Gary, colleagues, had no poetic ties) Gary Grossman’s voice is indeed his own, and his new book adds something vital to the richness of contemporary poetry.
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