The Invisible World

With "the clarity / of a landscape made of single / grains of sand," the poems in John Canaday's The Invisible World invite readers on a journey through an exotic land, as the narrator travels for more than a year in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan before returning home to New England. Swept along by poetry alive to paradox, we encounter a world in which the Bible and the Qur'an, Eastern and Western traditions, ancient and modern artifacts, mystical and scientific attitudes, meet on equal footing, where a tape recorder perched on a minaret broadcasts the prerecorded cry of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. In these poems, the exotic includes not only a world of Bedouin and camels, djinn and ghouls, but also the internal territory of the narrator himself, who alternately feels "like an ambassador of sorts, / albeit penned in tourist class" and a "post-imperial naif / in metaphorical Bermuda shorts." Canaday offers here a complex meditation on the inner and outer nature of journeys and confronts the powerful recognition that the sense of the foreign arises through an inevitable encounter with the self.
Confident in both lyric and narrative modes, Canaday's poems create a stunning landscape of words, an invisible world of discovery, memory, and sensation.