by Laura Ohlmann
August 5, 2021
Laura Ohlmann is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida. Her work is forthcoming in The Rumpus and Twyckenham Notes. It has also appeared in The Maine Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Lindenwood Review, among others. She is an Associate Poetry Editor with West Trade Review and enjoys traveling in her converted Honda Element with her partner and dog.
Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar; Graywolf Press; 80 pages; $16.00
When I began to read Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell, I often felt out of my element. A question kept ringing: How do I relate to these poems? Of course, we read poems to be transported, to see through the eyes of the other, but there seemed to be so much distance to be covered: I, an American Jew, and Akbar, an Iranian-American. After reading his latest book of poems, however, I was transported into his world, one that isn’t familiar, one that is “hiding in the sound.” I came to a place where I felt at home.
Pilgrim Bell moves you: to a boy’s bedroom with his brother, where his father comes to know English through Rolling Stone’s lyrics, a place where the speaker is so vulnerable it feels like you’re bleeding.
Akbar, the author of Calling A Wolf A Wolf, has created a journey in Pilgrim Bell. It’s immediately clear in the movement in the lines. He is very careful at first, as not to scare us away, each period at the end of the line is meant to pause you, to keep the reader there a little longer. It’s a poem that keeps us uncomfortable because it’s “dark on both sides” like the speaker in the first rendition of “Pilgrim Bell” and you can feel the speaker’s fear of the unknown deity.
Akbar’s book is structured around several poems titled “Pilgrim Bell”, each serving as a milestone of conquering fear in our journey, each becoming a little less careful. In one rendition, he begins the poem: “How long can you speak. / Without inhaling.” It’s straightforward, and though it’s not explicit, it may draw allusions to the murder of George Floyd. The poem calls on the reader to bring themselves inside to make sense of the unsensible.
These poems are like the configuration of a cross country journey. You follow the route; you stick to the plan. You’re careful at first, you make sure all your bases are covered. After a while, you become a bit more daring . . . then something unforeseeable happens. Then, careful again, and soon, the freefall into the poems.
In “Palace Mosque, Frozen,” the speaker is stuck in an uncomfortable form—a box, a configuration meant to keep your head tilting to view the poem at every angle. The speaker is always in a state of undoing. His reader, thus, is also undone:
“The heart is a muscle as stupid / as a hamstring or a miniature / iris with its ridiculous blossoms / blooming only through ice / bright dust / pillowed floor / we see our prayers / as we say them.”
The restraint in the language palpates in a jarring rhythm and suffocating images, which serves to engulf the reader as the speaker is also engulfed, in prayer. The speaker in Akbar’s poems is often in a state of prayer, to G-d, to Muhammed, to the prophets as though they are holding on to something.
In the poem, “Despite my Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned to Threats,” the speaker says, “I know it’s silly / to keep what I’ve kept from you; / you always so charmed / by my weakness” and we are immersed in his unknowing of G-d as he speaks to him. In the same poem, the speaker reveals he had stolen two peaches and savored the sweetness . . . he shows us that even small infractions are forgivable.
In “How Prayer Works,” the poem eschews all restraint in the form of prose. It is imbued with humor at the feet of G-d, with his brother in their tight-knit bedroom. His brother catches his foot on the “coiled brass doorstep” and falls to the floor on their prayer rugs. It’s a moment of simplicity and beauty for brotherhood and beliefs, where they were “hopeless, laughing at our laughing.” The language seems to move faster, with less contemplation—when Akbar enters the universe of long-form writing, he lets loose. The effect it has on the reader is that of freedom, a breath of fresh air, the open road.
In an interview with The New Yorker about the book, Akbar says: “Pilgrim Bell as a whole is a kind of pilgrim’s journey, a pilgrim trying to move from a desperate desire to believe into belief itself, while all the usual suspects—nation, language, memory, self-will—conspire against him. I’ve been thinking a lot about bells, how it’s the heft of a body that makes a bell ring. The book is another way to throw weight into sound.”
Akbar invites us on the journey in Pilgrim Bell. And with each rendition of the title poem, we throw our weight into the language, which always comes back ringing in our minds. He allows us into his world by doing what poetry often does so well: move the reader—through time, through place, from perspective to perspective. When our world seems more and more lately to show what separates us, Kaveh’s poems bring us together. Each one pushes us along, forcing us to recognize what makes each of us wholly human by showing his own humanity, in full force, restraint building power, and completely letting go. As you let go, each poem will build on the one before it. Take your time before reaching the final poem, “The Palace” and “don’t dream of doing anything / by halves.”
©2021 West Trade Review
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The Journey in Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell
POETRY REVIEW
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