On Exile & The Lost Country of Sight: Thoughts on a Reading by Neil Aitken
Reviewed By Michael Parker
I gather my favorite books around me as if they are a treasure; and I keep them close as if they are dear friends. “The Lost Country of Sight,” by Neil Aitken, published in 2008, is one of these books.
Yesterday, Neil Aitken returned to his alma mater, Brigham Young University, as a guest speaker at the Humanities Department “Friday Reading.” I had the opportunity to attend and listen to Aitken deliver a dozen poems from his 2007 Philip Levine Prize-winning collection and also three highly-engaging and brilliant poems from his new manuscript about the 19th-century eccentric mathematician Charles Babbage, titled “Babbage’s Dreams.”
But that is another story. I want to focus on his work already in our midst, “The Lost Country of Sight.”
Aitken opened his reading speaking about the theme of exile, specifically an allegorical sense of displacement he has felt during his life. Ever since he was young, his family seemed country-less, following their dad from Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, the Western United States and into Canada as he took job after job teaching English as a second language. Even in his adult years, Aitken’s sense of place and of home always felt tenuous and fluid. To Aitken, the experience of an exile, political or allegorical at root, is a displacement that leaves us longing for a homeland…a piece of space in which we construct sacred places.
Years ago, Aitken explained that he came across an essay of Andre Achiman in “Letters of Transit.” Achiman notes “that every exile suffers from a form of double-vision where it is impossible to view one city without seeing the city one came from as well.”
“I feel much the same way,” Aiken commented to his audience. “Each place I end up is haunted by the ghosts of the places I’ve been. But we ever move forward, knowing we are the countries that we leave behind.”
Aitken’s beautiful introduction was fitting for the opening poems he read, for they highlighted the pain the exiled experience when leaving. From the first poem, “In the long dream of exile” (p. 5):
….There is nothing left
in your pockets, your clothes worn down
to this list of miles taking you out of the known earth.
Outside your open window, the dark repeats
like the wind in late fall, twisting the names
of familiar back roads into a long rope of sighs.
From “Outside Plato’s Republic, The Last Poets Wait For Departure” (p. 6):
….This unbending
yearning. These barren limbs sprouting from a man
worn smooth by wind and water. How they stretch,
reaching for a heaven of silence, some dim realm
of rope and boards. A bridge. A strict metered offering.
Even. Still. The emptiness of fired clay. A scale.
A measure of wanting. Each hand a receptacle for ghosts.
Oh, what amazing visions — empty pockets, worn clothes, hands that hold nothing but ghosts, barren limbs, bridges in the sky. They, indeed, accentuate the overriding sense of loss of one who leaves with nothing from the past. This perspective was also shared by Aitken’s spiritual tutor, Andre Achiman. Consider the Achiman quote (from “Letters of Transit”) that graces the introductory pages of “Lost Country of Sight”:
“In the disappearance of small things, I read the tokens of my own dislocation, of my own transiency. An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.”
What a poignant statement, “in the key of loss.” And it suddenly transforms the metaphor of being exiled to encompass more than the loss of land, of place, and of the objects we leave behind or lose that equally tie our memories and traditions to a homeland. For Aitken, it also encompasses the loss of a loved one, his father.
“I moved home while I was in the midst of writing the manuscript for ‘Lost Country of Sight’,” he explained, “in order to care for my father who was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, a devastating neurodegenerative disease that affects the nerve cells. Though your mind and memory remain alert and unaffected, your muscle and body waste away.”
The exile out of loss from death was at the root of the second movement of poems that AItken read to us. In his poem “Burials”, Aitken described the experience of seeing his father mourn the loss of his father. In “First Poem,” he writes about the 5th-grade girl who he had his first crush on, only to lose her to leukemia. And finally, consider the beautiful, heart-rending verses that directly addressed the passing of his father: from “My Father As Landscape” (p.26),
My father is a forest in winter where death
has cast her grey nets wide over the outstretched limbs.
He is not the pale skin of snow, nor what lies beneath:
last year’s leaves pooling in remembered red, the tumbled nests
of wrens, the bones of sparrows lightened by sorrow, whatever
the winds have laid down in their paths. He is the bear who lingers
at the edge of the frozen creek though the blackberries are gone.
He is the tree split by a summer storm, the last of the pollen
caught in the awkward breeze. The deer stepping back out of the light.
From “Traveling through the prairies, I think of my father’s voice”
….Coming through on the straight road,
the land seems especially bare this year, although the fields are still green
with new stalks of wheat, rye, canola. Someone has been taking down
the grain elevators one by one, striking their weathered wooden frames
from the skyline, leaving only small metal bins. The way the disease
took him by degrees, the body jettisoning what it could: his arms and legs,
his grin, his laugh, his voice. In the end, only his eyes — their steel doors
opening and closing while the storm rattled within — and his breath,
the body’s voice, repeating the only name it knew sigh after sigh,
a lullaby sung to a restless child on a heaving deck, a hush we only learn
in the quiet dark long after the boat has gone and the waves have ceased.
And consider his poem “How we are saved,” (p. 28) in its entirety:
Gathered at the side of my father’s bed, his body still
warm to the touch, his eyes darkening like those of a fish
laid high on the river bank, the sun slipping through
half-closed blinds into the cream-colored room —
we have come to dress him one last time.
To bend his arms, not for prayer, but to slide the sleeves
of the clean white shirt over, to pull each limb through —
pants, socks, shoes — till the body is clothed, readied at last
to meet whatever fiery light will embrace it first. The kiln,
the grave, love’s small white cloud that arrives just before rain.
No, this is just a body. Clay and water. Hollow. What we shed
in the white room over words of prayer. What we weave of memory,
grace for grace, this already faded circle of thought and longing.
Oh, this body — grown more wind than flesh, even as the air leaves
his lungs, there is a knocking at the door, something dark
and hopeful rising to my lips, the strains of a very old song.
Neil Aitken’s “The Lost Country of Sight” is one of those collections I have ear-marked and bookmarked and placed in the main bookcase in my home office because I return to it frequently. Yes, it’s a thing of beauty, particularly because of how its themes about exile, the loss and yearning to construct sacred places out of unchartered territory, love, grief, and of rising and existing beyond the loss of loved ones speak to me.
There are qualities and skills that make Aitken so accessible and meaningful. But let me speak directly to one characteristic — Aitken has this innate gift of sentience that radiates through his work like a song; it’s Buddhist-like, this unyielding desire to observe life in action, an adoration of how life and humanity connects, how humanity can connect, and the great care for which he desires to communicate his observations and insights to us. At times, his work is breathtaking.
Furthermore, Aitken’s work wouldn’t be as engaging if he was not such a keen and astute craftsman of the language, employing beautifully lyrical language that fills in the details of his rich canvass of amazing images. IN fact, speaking of lyrical language: four poems from “Lost Country of Sight” have been used in musical compositions of Juhi Bansal. That is how well his poetry relates, how beloved they already have become.
Which brings me to my favorite “praise” on the back of the collection’s cover art, by the poet Li-Young Lee: “The voice in these poems is that of a sighted, awake heart discovering its home in language and its homelessness in the world. Steeped in longing, the imagination here is concrete, vivid, sensuous, and ultimately erotic, even as it perceives that meaning and beauty are evanescent. This book is a full helping from the world’s infinite fund of tears.”
It’s all true.
List of poems read: ““In the long dream of exile,” “Outside Plato’s Republic, The Last Poets Wait For Departure,” “The art of forgetting,” “Burials,” “At the end of poetry,” “My father as landscape,” “how we are saved,” “counting winters in Los Angeles,” “First Poem,” and “Traveling through the prairies, I think of my father’s voice.”
“The Lost Country of Sight” by Neil Aitken is a publication of Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, Florida, 2008.
