The Invisible World: Poems

Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 66 pp.; 24 cm. First paperback edition. Tight, clean copy. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. "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 na f / 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." - Publisher.. Paperback. Fine. 8vo.