The Invisible World

by John Canaday

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807127760
• ISBN13: 9780807127766
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Length: 66 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Impostors

Every American should read the long poem in the middle of Canaday's book THE INVISIBLE WORLD. It's called "Impostors" and it's written ala Dante in a sort of terza rima because it is the story of part of a journey. (I saw it first in the journal Raritan.) As in many of the poems in this book, the speaker of "Impostors" is a pretty transparent stand-in for the poet, who lived for a time in Jordan and who is in part here to retail his experiences as an American abroad. Canaday's generation of this simulacrum of himself riffs on Whitman's assertion that the poet "contains multitudes"--and one of the pleasures of "Impostors" is that every American reader will both identify with and feel squirrelly about being one of Canaday's speaker's brethern. The speaker is you, in other words, but he's also an impostor and the poem's tale will have you pointing fingers at your own posing, your own characterizations of "the other," your own self-satisifactions with your own estimations of your generosity of spirit. "Impostors" is funny and it's serious; it doesn't apologize for being literary or for being part of a conception that literature can be complex and useful and pleasurable at the same time. Read it.