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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 more: stones, deserts, the
silence of God, the terrifying, consoling, vast invisible world.
An incredibly timely book, full of intelligence, insight, and striking language.
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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.
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".
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