When the poet Kaveh Akbar was a young child, his father taught him to recite Muslim prayers in Arabic, a language Akbar didn’t understand, and which his family spoke only during worship. Mimicking those incantatory sounds, he briefly embodied a foreign tongue. He could inhabit the lyric beauty of the words, he discovered, even without grasping their meaning. Akbar, who was born in Iran, arrived in the United States when he was two, a transition that imparted another lesson in linguistic gain and loss: while he picked up English, Farsi began to fade. In a poem called “Do You Speak Persian?,” Akbar writes, “I have been so careless with the words I already have. / / I don’t remember how to say home / in my first language, or lonely, or light.”
Poetry requires the opposite of such carelessness, and Akbar is exquisitely sensitive to how language can function as both presence and absence. In his most recent collection, “Pilgrim Bell” (Graywolf), words assume physical, palpable form—as reverberations in the mouth and ear—but can just as easily take on a spectral aura, reminding us of worlds and selves no longer within reach. “The Miracle,” written in short, parable-like paragraphs, opens with a story from the life of Muhammad, in which the Prophet, then an illiterate merchant, is visited by the angel Gabriel, commanded to “read,” and given his first revelation. In Akbar’s retelling, this gift of knowledge isn’t benevolently bestowed; it’s thrust upon the recipient without his consent, the angel “squeezing out the air of protest, the air of doubt, crushing it out of his crushable human body.” Language can illuminate the world, but it can also destroy a self. It may be both good and bad fortune, then, that no grand truth will be elucidated for the poet: “Gabriel isn’t coming for you,” Akbar tells himself.
In “the absence of cloud-parting, trumpet-blaring clarity,” these poems ask what meaning can be found—or made—through partial revelation, in a world so often defined by misunderstandings: with others, with God, with ourselves. Sometimes the lack of clarity is literal. Flip through this book and you’ll notice formal and stylistic strategies that play at the edges of decipherability. One poem is printed backward, forcing us to either hold it up to a mirror or patiently decode it letter by letter. (Farsi is read right to left, a reminder that our notion of backwardness is always arbitrary.) The six enigmatic poems that share the book’s title are studded with periods that keep interrupting the speaker midsentence, as though his hurtling train of thought required speed bumps.
This illegibility, in Akbar’s hands, becomes a site of creativity. “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic” begins with an admission:
Akbar’s writing, like his halting translation, depends on resourcefulness, a surrender to a given set of materials, even those which elude understanding. The words he assembles are like so many puzzle pieces, and meaning is created even when they don’t fit.
In Akbar’s poetry, what the mind strains to interpret the body often feels viscerally. “Pilgrim Bell” is strewn with throats, lungs, teeth, clavicles. In Akbar’s first full-length collection, “Calling a Wolf a Wolf,” from 2017, about struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, he writes, “every step I’ve taken / has been from one tongue to another,” a nonsensical collision of body parts—feet and mouths—that captures just how total, and totalizing, the physicality of language can be. “Wolf” overflows with compulsive speech, a frenzy that replaces, or relives, the mania of intoxication. The reader moves through the narrator’s sensorium like a pinball, ricocheting between strange visions and exuberant riffs:
And yet alongside this wordplay we sense that Akbar’s concern with language is deadly serious: to speak is to survive.
In “Pilgrim Bell,” claustrophobic monologues open up, making room for other sympathetic characters. “Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997” revolves around a joke Akbar’s father told him as a child about how to differentiate Persians from Arabs and white people: “we’re just uglier,” the punch line goes. This is a lesson in yet another type of legibility, the kind written on the human face. It isn’t, at first, a comfortable lesson: for an eight-year-old, it’s a recipe for self-consciousness. Still, this poem is also full of sensual texture and nostalgic pleasure. Akbar’s father’s smile is “a warm nest / of lip”; his voice, “the first sound I ever heard.” If the fraught question of beauty within communities of color can sometimes inspire generic calls for self-esteem, a corrective to society’s othering gaze, this tongue-in-cheek ode to “ugliness” offers something possibly deeper: a sense of self that is truly sensory.
Just as pain and pleasure vie in Akbar’s search for identity within his family, so, too, do they shape his reckoning with divinity. Like another transcendentally inclined chronicler of addiction, the late poet Franz Wright, Akbar suggests that pain’s intensity thrusts us into the sublime—or, at least, replaces God’s untouchability with something that we can feel in our flesh. In “Vines,” Akbar’s description of a divine encounter echoes John Donne: where Donne implores the Lord to “batter” and “ravish” him, Akbar imagines that God has “bricked up my mouthhole.” Elsewhere, he speculates that faith, rather than originating in the unknown, “passes first through the body / like an arrow.”
When divine wisdom is violently imposed, the poet responds by forging his own knowledge. “I live in a great mosque,” he writes,
What he hammers and builds—this book—is beautiful, but it isn’t always durable, or endurable. He laments that his “savior” is often a “no-call no-show. Curious menace.” In “My Empire,” he caustically observes, “The prophets came to participate in suffering / as if to an amusement park, which makes / our suffering the main attraction.”
The question of who suffers and who watches is inevitably a political one. “Pilgrim Bell” builds up to “The Palace,” the longest poem in the book, and its most explicit take on power in America. Here the singular images that distinguish many of Akbar’s poems occasionally give way to more predictable symbols: “There are no doors in America. / Only king-sized holes.” Indeed, Akbar himself seems aware of this derivativeness. “It is absurd to say anything now / (much less anything new),” he writes. But his practice of taking language apart, and harnessing the empty space around it, makes even the most familiar words seem eerie and unexpected. Beneath the hyperbole of politics, Akbar uncovers a simpler, awkward humanity. His discoveries may not always be “new,” and may not always feel right, but they’re the truth:
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