| Title | : | Pilgrim Bell: Poems |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1644450593 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781644450598 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 80 |
| Publication | : | First published August 3, 2021 |
| Awards | : | PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection Longlist (2022) |
Pilgrim Bell: Poems Reviews
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Kaveh Akbar has spoken about poetry operating as a spiritual technology in his own life, an idea he explores in Pilgrim Bell. Many poems here read as prayers, some explicitly so. Akbar reckons with his Islamic faith, past addictions, family, and the lure of America. With this collection, his second, Akbar is finding his voice.
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Wildly interesting. A Persian-American who has lost touch with his roots, but what roots they are! And he knows it. Walking the same path as Hafez, Saadi, Ferdowsi, Rumi, Attar, etc. etc. They are all looking down at you, you feel the weight of it. Does Kaveh Akbar live up to them? Hell no. But why in the world would you ever try? He doesn’t. He is not trying to be a saint, merely a poet, in touch with his emotions. He does that well. Really well. So glad I own this book, because it takes multiple readings I think. Here was a beautiful portion of it, from a poem called Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic:
The title is a lie;
I can’t read Farsi.
ما هر چه را که باید از دست داده باشیم از دست داده ایم
I can make out:
“we lose,
we lose.”
I type it into a translation app:
“we have lost everything we need to lose.”
In between what I read and what is written:
“need,” “everything.”
I am just happy to have a new voice added to our North American Persian diaspora. -
not sure what it is about kaveh akbar (everything?), but his poetry tickles my brain in a way that cannot be explained or compared to any of my other poetry-reading experiences. i love the way that he wields language, i love that his collections compel me to reconsider the world at a new slant, and i love that tenderness imbues every inch of his work, even as we are delivered swiftly to our suffering:
You travel and bring back silk scarves, a bag of chocolates for you-don't-know-who-yet. Someone will want them. Deliver them to an empty field. You fall asleep facing the freckle on your wrist.
—Now watch these hands through your blood—jealous moths. How do they heaven, upset like that?
—Kneeling on coins / before the minor deity in the mirror. / Clueless as a pearl. / That the prophet arrived not to ease our suffering / but to experience it seems—can I say this?— / a waste?
—It's so unsettling / to feel anything but good. / I wish I was only as cruel as / the first time I noticed / I was cruel, waving my tiny / shadow over a pond to scare / the copper minnows.
—There are only / two bones in the throat, and that's / if you count the clavicle. This / seems unsafe, overdelicate, / like I ought to ask for / a third.
—Consider our whole galaxy / staked in place by a single star. I fear / we haven't said nearly enough about that.
—There are no good kings. / Only beautiful palaces.
—America, I warn you, if you invite me into your home / I will linger, / kissing my beloveds frankly, / pulling up radishes / and capping all your pens. / There are no good kings, / only burning palaces.
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I'll have to dive into this one again soon as it bears rereading thanks to so much going on. Religious stuff (Islam), political stuff (America), addiction stuff (Akbar's own life). But mostly word stuff (more on that ahead).
The first poem, one of many title poems called "Pilgrim Bell," takes a page out of Anne Carson's book by using periods that don't stop the reader and SHOULDN'T stop the reader if the reader hopes to make any sense out of the poem. Example:
Dark on both sides.
Makes a window.
Into a mirror. A man.
Holds his palms out.
To gather dew.
Through the night. Uses it.
To wash before.
Dawn prayer.
Et cetera. Like Carson, he does it because he can. And to make a point about periods. Like they rule our lives with their rules. And. Dammit. The Empire. In the form of Kaveh Akbar. Has struck back.
OK, OK. Enough. I got used to it in Carson's terrific poetry and it was easy to adjust to here. Plus, he only did this on all of the "Pilgrim Bell" poems vs. every poem in the book, so it's not a periodical poetry collection. And he did embrace word play, which I really like in a poet. For instance, a small example:
Who here could claim to be merely guilty?
The mere.
Sure, you could eye-roll that, but I chuckle at it and virtually high-five the poet for it. After all, if a poet can't play with words, who can?
Plenty of this book is a visual journey, too. An entire poem written backwards. Another as a square. Ones with jumps. All manner of indentations. Space as the final (white) frontiers. Waterfalls of words. Stinginess with words. Invectives. Self-incriminations. Leaps of faith. Proclamations of guilt.
In short, a lot going on meaning a lot to mull. The kind a first reading doesn't quite digest at first chew. -
My
Shelf Awareness review: This second poetry collection by Kaveh Akbar is a playful and profound meditation on life as a Muslim American.
Scriptural themes and echoes abound here. Prose poem "The Miracle" is about Muhammad the Prophet, an illiterate man who nevertheless read God's words at an angel's command. Akbar ponders the fears and addictions that hold people back from assenting to revelation. The multi-part title piece probes identity, forgiveness and vulnerability. Its short, punctuated phrases suggest timid determination: "All day I hammer the distance./ Between earth and me./ Into faith." Yet cynical skepticism is never far behind; "Ask me again/ about my doubt--turquoise/ today and almond-hard," he invites in the later poem "There Is No Such Thing as an Accident of the Spirit."
Farsi is a recurring point of reference, and "There Are 7,000 Living Languages" and other poems attest to the relativity and sensuality of language. The final entry, "The Palace," presents the USA as a land of opportunity--but with costs. Akbar's father left Iran not knowing if he'd ever see his siblings again. How was this immigrant family to feel at home when some Americans casually joke about bombing the poet's birthplace of Tehran?
Food, plants, animals and the body supply the book's imagery. Wordplay and startling juxtapositions ("my turn-ons/ include Rumi and fake leather") lend lightness to a wistful, intimate collection of 35 poems that seek belonging and belief. Readers should get a mirror out to read "In the Language of Mammon"--it's printed backwards--but keep it at hand for reflecting on their own challenges of faith and family.
(Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.) -
Ugh, I don't know how, but Kaveh Akbar has done it again with his second collection. I love how much you can trust his lines. I love how simultaneously immersed these poems are in the political and the personal and the spiritual, how they speak generously to this moment without an overt urgency, how they manage to prioritize beauty in language in the midst of all this and an at times ugly honesty about the world. He's truly doing it all, and is absolutely one of my favorite poets. Read this, read it again and again.
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I can tell from the reviews that others have appreciated this as very fine poetry, but I had trouble connecting with it despite having been very interested in the themes - immigration/dislocation/exile, spirituality, sexuality, living in an Islamophobic society. It may be that my taste in poetry isn’t quite sophisticated enough to enjoy putting in the necessary work with so much intertextuality and word play. I also found some of the playing with form very distracting - especially the poems with the periods inserted in the middle of every phrase. Nonetheless, there were some poems/images/phrases that captured me.
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I’d never heard of Kaveh Akbar until I read Calling a Wolf a Wolf in 2018 and gave it five stars. One of my compliments for his writing was, “I’m not someone who saves favorite quotes, but if I did, I’d cut a line of two from almost every Akbar poem for my scrapbook.” As a result, I added Pilgrim Bell to my Want to Read list as soon as I heard about it, but the book and I got off to a rocky start. He did several things to annoy me: From using. A period any. Time. He feels. Like it. to printing a poem backwards (mirror writing). I found I could decipher it, but it was giving me a headache, so I went upstairs to grab a mirror. I almost gave up then (page 26). Fortunately, he immediately offered more poems of the sort I expected.
Akbar could have saved me more trouble by placing his epigraph that appears on p. 61 at the front of the book. I was guessing that pilgrim bell referred to a bell that pilgrims either wore around their necks or rang at certain stages on their way to Mecca. No. The meaning fits the poetry even better than that.
"Al Harith bin Hisham asked the Prophet,
'O God’s Messenger! How is the Divine Inspiration revealed to you?'
The Prophet replied,
'Sometimes it is revealed like the ringing of a bell.'"
Hadith 4: 438
There are six poems titled “Pilgrim Bell” in this collection, not the first time I’ve seen this done as a repeating theme in a poetry book, but I wonder how anyone is supposed to keep them straight. Of these, my favorite was the final “Pilgrim Bell” that ends,
“I am so vulnerable.
To visionaries.
And absolute.
Certainty.
Tell me how to live.
And I will live that way.”
When he wasn’t naming all the poems the same, Akbar again impressed me with some titles that I had to jump into: “I Wouldn’t Even Know What to Do with a Third Chance,” “Against the Parts of Me That Think They Know Anything,” “Despite My Efforts, Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats,” and “Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong.”
I’ll end with some of my favorite quotes that brought my rating back up to five stars.
“…A heart
can sink too, like a root, or a library
whose architect forgot
to factor in the weight of its books. First you lose
Romance, then
Fiction, History. At the center of a heart
is data, the same
idiot degradation that turned the stars
into us….”
(“Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong”)
“…my mother hovers in
the kitchen like a strange tune”
(“Ultrasound”)
“….Watch: the devil enters Adam’s lips,
crawls through his throat, through his guts
to finally emerge out his anus.
He’s all hollow! the devil giggles.
He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long
desperation to be filled.”
(“My Father’s Accent”) -
If you spent five years alone in a room thinking about these two stanzas from "The Miracle," that seems like it would be the appropriate way/amount of time to think about them:
Gabriel seizing the illiterate man, alone and fasting in a cave, and commanding READ, the man saying I can't, Gabriel squeezing him tighter, commanding READ, the man gasping I don't know how, Gabriel squeezing him so tight he couldn't breathe, squeezing out the air of protest, the air of doubt, crushing it out of his crushable human body, saying READ IN THE NAME OF YOUR LORD WHO CREATED YOU FROM A CLOT, and thus: literacy. Revelation.
It wasn't until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the Prophet could be filled with miracle. Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill--with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise--and imagine them gone. What's left? Whatever you aren't, which is what makes you--a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space in them. -
sometimes you read a book and you wish you were smarter so you could understand all the references and this is one of those books. some of the poems are stuck in my chest like a greasy meal and it’s going to take a few scrapings to get them out.
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This book left me speechless.
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In keeping with a promise I made to myself, in which I was challenged to take a pause on the audiobook facet of my reading and spend more time with the Poetry Foundation's VS podcast, I've now listened to 17 episodes. I spent two weeks with the ebullient laughter of Franny Choi and Danez Smith, and learned about several new poets I can't wait to read.
One of my fave episodes was an early one with Kaveh Akbar. Akbar, whose debut I gave a 5 star review to several years ago, strikes me as a person who is intensely, even infectiously curious. My favourite human quality!
After spending a lot of time with his newest collection, *Pilgrim Bell*, I can say my admiration is justified, both in his incessant search for poetry's sustainable power and in how he seems to open spaces with his questioning. I'm sure he is an amazing professor.
*Pilgrim Bell* was a challenging, weighty read about a man's quest for and quest-ions about spiritually. Although none are labeled as such, each poem almost acts as an individual's prayer, begging the reader to not join him in recitation but to listen to the poetry within our own unspoken prayers.
I listened to two additional interviews with Akbar to help me understand his vision, which I'd recommend. I believe that's part of the point here---a text that asks us to listen hard and be open to what isn't initially apparent to be unearthed, but to also keep digging.
I've spent a few days trying to find the words to capture how this work bewitched me. I still feel there is more to say so please share your thoughts if you've read this. I feel like each time I return to these poems, I'll find tons of new things left to wonder.
If you are looking for earnest poetry engaged with its whole heart with unanswerable questions around spirituality, border-crossing, and the human capacity to shape the lives we have been given, I invite you to seek out *Pilgrim Bell*. -
I found something I loved in almost every poem. Spirituality, guilt, joy, family - Akbar covers a lot of ground here, and I definitely want to find a copy for myself and re-read it.
I have been yearning for a couple of years now to find an ethical framework that resonates with me, to make sense of and give meaning to the myriad cruelties of the world, and my role in them. I thought that I might find answers in a religion or spiritual practice (and I hope that I may still), but some of the poems in this collection are actually the closest I’ve come to what I’ve been seeking. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given how much Kaveh Akbar infuses these poems with aspects of spirituality and his faith.
I also really loved this interview he did about the collection, where there is an extended discussion on faith and poetry:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/kaveh-...
I’ll end this review with one of my favorite poems from this book, “My Empire”:
“My empire made me
happy because it was an empire
and mine.
I was too stupid to rage at anything.
Babies cried at birth, it was said,
because the devil pricked them as an introduction
to knowledge.
I sat fingering my gilded frame, counting
grievances like toes:
here my mother, here my ring,
here my sex, and here my king.
All still here. Wrath is the desire
to repay what you’ve suffered.
Kneeling on coins
before the minor deity in the mirror.
Clueless as a pearl.
That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering
but to experience it seems - can I say this? -
a waste?
My empire made me happy
so I loved, easily, its citizens - such loving
a kind of birth, an introduction to pain.
Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.
The new missiles can detect a fly’s heartbeat
atop a pile of rubble from 6,000 miles away.
That flies have hearts, 104 cells big, that beat.
And because of this knowing:
a pile of rubble.
The prophets came to participate in suffering
as if to an amusement park, which makes
our suffering the main attraction.
I’m our brochure:
a father’s grief over his dead father,
the thorn broken off in a hand.
My empire made me happy
because it was an empire, cruel,
and the suffering wasn’t my own.” -
MY FATHER’S ACCENT
A boy, prettier than me, who loved me because
my vocabulary and because my orange pills, once asked me
to translate my father’s English.
This poem wants me to translate it too.
Idiot poem, idiot hands for writing it:
an accent isn’t sound.
Only those to whom it seems alien
would flatten an accent to sound.
My poem grew up here, sitting in this American chair
staring out at this lifeless American snow.
Black grass dying up out of this snow,
through a rabbit’s
long tracks, like a ghost
sitting upright
saying oh.
But even that’s a lie.
No tracks.
Just black grass, blue snow.
I can’t write this
without trying to make it
beautiful. Submission, resistance, surrender.
On first
inspecting Adam, the devil entered his lips.
Watch: the devil enters Adam’s lips,
crawls through his throat, through his guts
to finally emerge out his anus.
He’s all hollow! the devil giggles.
He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long
desperation to be filled.
My father’s white undershirt peeking out
through his collar. My father’s hand slicing skin, gristle,
from a chicken carcass I hold still against the cutting board.
Sometimes he bites his bottom lip to suppress
what must be
rage. It must be rage
because it makes no sound. My vast
terror at what I can’t hear,
at my ignorance, is untranslatable.
My father speaks in perfect English. -
A more spiritual version of Jeet Thayil’s poetry, with a stylized academic (putting that MFA to good use I suppose) touch.
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kaveh akbar is one of my favorite living poets, so i was very excited to read this. the poems in the first section didn’t quite do it for me (with notable exception of “reza’s restaurant, chicago, 1997”). in the following sections, i was floored by almost every poem, and i say this as someone who hasn’t been able to quite read poetry in the past two years. brilliant brilliant brilliant.
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this book of poems was meditative, cathartic, freeing. akbar writes with a steady flow and rhythm, calming even in its enormity. really grateful to be able to read poets like akbar who take such care in their craft.
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
“a heart / can sink too, like a root, or a library / whose architect forgot / to factor in the weight of its books”
“i hope somebody / forgets you today too. i hope somebody / cuts that ribbon free” -
i read this collection mostly on walks by the water and intermittently out loud, which i think was the only way i could bear it
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read in one sitting
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'I demand.
To be forgiven.
I demand.
A sturdier soul.
Every person I’ve ever met.
Has been small enough.
To fit.
In my eye.'
(from 'Pilgrim Bell', p41) -
"My empire made me happy
because it was an empire, cruel,
and the suffering wasn’t my own." -
Visceral and gorgeous lines. Will read everything Kaveh Akbar writes (ilysm)
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Language is a pilgrimage. Without language one is less than the less one is in a hostile land with a hostile language. To speak the language of hostility does not bring one home, it creates disturbances. Poetry is another language within and without home.
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I know I can't fully appreciate the work of art that is this collection but I truly enjoy Kaveh Akbar's prose. Some of my favorites include Palace Mosque, Frozen and How Prayer Works. Almost every other one to be honest.
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Such an amazing young poet. He's a great metaphorist. Sometimes he's funny. Sometimes kind of shocking. More often he's wise, mystical. Here are some of my favorite lines, from a poem called "My Father's Accent":
"On first
inspecting Adam, the devil entered his lips.
Watch: the devil enters Adam's lips,
crawls through his throat, through his guts
to finally emerge out his anus.
He's all hollow! the devil giggles.
He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long
desperation to be filled."
In several poems called "Pilgrim Bell", he uses periods midsentence, like so:
"With sound. A silver ring.
Lost in the bedsheets is still.
A silver ring. You can either be.
More holy or more full but.
Not both. See how the hot.
Element glows red. How.
Honey cools the tea. Suppose..."
After reading five or six poems like this, I started wondering
Why does. Kaveh keep.
Doing this. Shit.
But I mean, maybe there's a reason. Probably there's a good reason. At least he's trying some different. Things. Out. When a lot of poets just sort of run in place for decades at a time. -
This book advances what Calling a Wolf a Wolf began: the establishment of Kaveh Akbar as one of the greatest authors alive today. This book, like Wolf, is not only compelling and musical, it is also completely accessible and deeply moving. I recommend this book for anyone. It's filled with beauty in every line. A true gem of a collection.
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Poetry is like a language I don't always fully understand. Yet, I keep trying. I suspect that these are good poems. It's impossible for me to rate them.
What I can say, is how the poetry made me feel. These words fell like eggs, the yolks filled with a tremendous striving and frustration, of wanting to be heard and known. -
I was reading this book on a long string of busses while commuting and, without exaggeration, it started raining on me while I was sitting outside waiting for a bus but I was too drawn into the book to even notice. So much care and love in these poems. A must-read!!
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The wording here was a little sparse, and there were too many times when I felt like I didn't understand what Akbar was intending to express.
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Just the right balance of carnal-degenerate and penitent pilgrim. I like this guy a lot.
