| 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 naïf / 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.
John Canaday is the author of The Nuclear Muse:
Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. He teaches
a broad range of subjects—from playwriting to physics—to students
from third grade to college in the Boston area. During 1991–1992
he lived in Jordan while tutoring the children of King Hussein
and Queen Noor.
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