When Faith was an Arrow

When considering addiction one must realize it is not so much a kind of strength to not have been re-broken, but a kind of practice. This is not to say the addict, once sober, no longer struggles, but that the relationship to the struggle changes. Kaveh Akbar’s poetry collection Pilgrim Bell is all about the dynamics and responsibilities of sobriety, continuing a thread from Akbar’s debut Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Take, for instance, the preserved insistence of the speaker on sobriety being a practice of sustainability rather than a kind of purity. In a poem entitled “Seven Years Sober,” Akbar writes, “Trust God but tie your camel. Trust / God. The bottle by the bed the first / few weeks. Just in case. Trust.” 

There are poems in the collection that position sobriety not as a duration or a distance-from-addiction, but as an orientation and personal curation. This looks different for everyone. For some it is a kind of abstinence, for others it is a kind of moderation or boundary. For Akbar it is the recognition that “a human is one long desperation / to be filled” and making sure to have “murdered my least defensible vices / stacking them like bodies / in the surf.”

The speaker isn’t an ideal speaker, they are candid about their flaws, and I think this makes them more believable: 

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.

This feels like a much more self-aware speaker than in Calling a Wolf a Wolf, not because that book lacked insight or understanding, but because this book deals with a different kind of obsession. Rather than the self, it is the extensions of self—the bridges we build between things—that Pilgrim Bell takes interest in. It presents a necessary distance in evaluation that no longer has to navigate pity or self-loathing, as some scarce moments in Calling a Wolf a Wolf did. In addition, there is much more done in service to others throughout the poems, their entities becoming intensely realized as fully-embodied characters: 

if I were a mother

I’d lose my child at the fair and go on

riding rides zooming through the

air singing Which way I fly is

heaven! I myself am heaven! But

my mother hated rides

she was happy to buy me cotton candy and

sit on a bench smiling

she’d watch me eat the whole bag

Along these lines, the poems in Pilgrim Bell find themselves asking questions intent on discovering the true distance between the living and the living, and the living and the dead. The answers emerging from a kind of Agnostic spirituality, though one still rooted in a Muslim tradition. Throughout the collection there is a movement in the poems that slowly replaces faith in God with faith in the self.

The first poem in the collection interjects that “Only a God. / Can turn himself into. / A God.” and acts as an assertion that the divine is either unattainable or pervasive. But as the collection progresses, the speaker undergoes a transition into the recognition that “all piety leads to a single / point: the same paradise / where dead lab rats go.” Slowly letting go of a concrete iteration of God, demonstrated through moments like:

It’s not that we forgot God or the martyrs or the Prophet’s

holy word—quite the opposite, in fact, we were boys built

to love what was in front of our faces: my brother and I

on the floor draped across each other, laughing tears into

our prayer rugs.

This collection includes the tacit recognition that God might also be a human construct, “Lord. / Time will break what doesn’t / bend—even time. Even you.” And through expressing the work of reconstructing belief, “All day I hammer the distance. / Between earth and me. / Into faith,” the collection finds a way to negate the speaker’s statement of “To say it plainly, / that I don’t trust myself? / And that I never will?”

Parts of Pilgrim Bell exist in the same tradition as Mary Oliver, another queer poet and Agnostic spiritualist intent on curating a relationship with the divine. Relational moments like these are realized through bewilderment and awe, with poems interjecting whimsy reminiscent of Heather Christle poems. For Akbar, awe is a form of spirituality—the physical manifestation of it—and this book strives not to lose its wonder. There is also an obvious participation in an ecstatic poetics similar to Ellen Bryant Voight in terms of form and syntax. Sometimes this will mask the speaker, who gets muddled in moments by the poetic structure. Yet, there are times where this ecstatic syntax is perfectly curated and surpasses even Voight’s use of similar forms:

So many people.

Have been awful to you.

I’ve given each one.

A number. When you’re ready.

I will ask you to draw me.

Their hands.   

While the collection operates on many levels and resonances, it should be impossible for a white reviewer to not mention its anti-imperialist essence. As an American, and especially as a white American, I am unable to read this book and not feel implicated enough by its renderings of violence. Within Pilgrim Bell I am shown not that I am complicit or passively related to oppression, but that I am actively responsible for it. It is a compelling project, yes, but it is also a challenging one to engage with:

My empire made me happy

because it was an empire, cruel,

and the suffering wasn’t my own.

Akbar considers the violence of English as a colonizer’s language and the ethics of art-making within it, challenging himself in the process. He demonstrates that English is not interested in the true identity of a thing, that clarity and honesty are not its hallmarks, and that power pollutes and obscures meaning. Take for example the many euphemisms within English for doing well: you crushed it! you killed it! you demolished it! etc. This is but a meager supplement to the stipulation and begins to point towards the realization that violence is often centered and lauded, even at the language level. In addition, Akbar demonstrates how euphemism is used to cover up violence in the final section of the book—the long poem The Palace—where he also critiques American cultural values:

My life

growing monstrous

with ease…

There are no doors in America.

Only king-sized holes…

There is no elegant way

to say this—people

with living hearts

that could fit in my chest

want to melt the city where I was born…

Pilgrim Bell will be an enduring collection. Within it there are many palpable moments of joy, acting as a kind of lodestar and intercessory device for the world. There are considerations of violence and ethics, instances of formal restlessness and inventiveness, and a deep empathy for a broken world. Pilgrim Bell is a dazzling and incredibly nuanced effort, one that presciently realizes “They say it’s not / faith if you can hold it in your hands / but I suspect the opposite may be true, / that real faith passes first through the body / like an arrow.” Kaveh has shot us through with an arrow, and I have bled all over this page.