Walt Whitman wrote that "the mere fact, consciousness"-the very awareness of being a thinking thing with sensations-so awed and pleased him that he could hardly move beyond that initial astonishment. In his fourth book of poems, Chris Forhan lingers in that place of amazement, finding in it bemusement, an occasional flicker of terror, and joy.
The Ghost Won't Go meditates upon the ghosts that inhabit a consciousness: the memories and imaginings, the griefs and yearnings, the random encounters with hailstorms, herons, fairy tales, and pop songs that, as the self develops, become indistinguishable from that self. These are poems about an old song you have forgotten and then suddenly find yourself humming. They are about that cloud that might as well have drifted into the sky out of a memory from decades ago. They are about a passion for someone and the doubting of that passion, for who knows where it comes from?
The poems also contemplate what is beyond consciousness: the eternal, the ground of nonbeing, the blankness upon which we write our lives and may yet return to. They yearn for an experience of "the present / without a past." They are haunted by what Emily Dickinson "could not see to see" and by "the nothing" beheld by Wallace Stevens's snowman. Amid the continuing riddle of human experience, they conclude that everywhere are things "worthy / of wonder," not the least of which are the vicissitudes and riches of love.