The Invisible World

WINNER OF THE 2001 WALT WHITMAN AWARD FROM THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS With a formal power and clear-eyed purpose, John Canaday's The Invisible World seems to spring fully-formed into the ranks of contemporary poetry. Part travelogue, part cultural study, part spiritual autobiography, it charts its course on a richly internalized journey to the Islamic Middle East. In the course of that journey, its restless, God-haunted narrator takes on, with a fluency steeped in the mythos of the Western literary tradition, such a broad range of cultural and metaphysical issues that the reader must stop to remember that this is a first book of poems. With The Invisible World Mr. Canaday makes a remarkably accomplished debut. --Sherod Santos, from his judge's citation In these unique, beautifully made poems we see how immersion in another culture can alter our cool American regard. Now as never before we should be thirsty for the news they have to bring us. --Mark Jarman John Canaday's The Invisible World holds nothing less than a world of surprises. These poems are comic, quizzical, mordant, and heartbreaking by turns. And always--beneath the trope of modesty--ambitious and assured. Among many other delights, there's the title poem, and then there's "The House of God," which adroitly take on Wordsworth and Emerson just for starters, then move on from there with linguistic aplomb into something deeper, something stones, deserts, the silence of God, the terrifying, consoling, vast invisible world. --Paul Mariani In his remarkably accomplished first book, The Invisible World, John Canaday has mastered many forms, such as the classical blank verse line, which he uses without ever violating his commitment to colloquial diction. And his long poem, "Impostors," written in Dantean terza rima, is truly a tour de force, a poem of great intricacy and wit, full of verbal surprises and inventiveness. This is a book of mature accomplishment that will engage anyone who delights in richness of detail and in what Wallace Stevens called "the gaiety of language". --Robert Pack An incredibly timely book, full of intelligence, insight, and striking language. --Linda Pastan