Striking and Resonant: A Review of Kaveh Akbar's Pilgrim Bell
Throughout Pilgrim Bell, there is a boisterous ringing spread over the pages. Many of the poems in Kaveh Akbar’s stunning second collection deal with the ugliness we are given from the world, from God, or from “people / with living hearts / that could fit in [our] chest[s].” However, within this harshness that Pilgrim Bell offers, we can find prayers, not only to Akbar’s God, but to the reader, begging us to “imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill… and imagine them gone… what’s left? Whatever you aren’t, which is what makes you.” Akbar asks us to exist within our absences, as seen in “My Father’s Accent”, after describing the devil crawling through the body of Adam: “a human just one long / desperation to be filled.”
The collection of poems begins simply: a call and response, broken across two pages, first declaring, “Any text that is not a holy text is an apostasy” and in response: “Then it is a holy text,” Akbar offering these words as a candlestick to guide the reader through the rest of the tremendously tight work. Three of the book’s four sections are bookended with a variation of the title piece, “Pilgrim Bell,” which are sparse poems, littered with short lines and periods, mimicking the back-and-forth ringing of a bell. The poems find their voice, their essence, in silence, each line broken at just the right word, allowing everything within the 70 pages to resonate like the vibrating tone of bronze.
Such resonance is seen in the poems that follow each “Pilgrim Bell.” The airy “Vines” or the somber “Seven Years Sober” allow the sound built in the title poems to bounce from the walls, fading until it is nothing, just as “Against Memory” ends without a word. Even the section break symbols—small squares (◻)—or the poem “Palace Mosque, Frozen”—its lines formatted to look like a square within a square—suggests that our understanding of the poems come from what is within. As Akbar puts in “The Miracle”: “a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.”
While what we find within Pilgrim Bell can be beautiful—two brothers laughing through their prayers, a mother watching her son eat an entire bag of cotton candy—the book does not shy away from the ugliness around us. Poems dealing with alcoholism and addiction, the massacre of 1,000 Hui Muslims in China, or the deaths of millions from COVID-19 “because we need mail… because we need groceries.” But in “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic”, we see that even this honest ugliness holds what it is not: “So much of wet is cold. / So much of diamond is light.” To echo the collection’s thesis, Akbar suggests that while what shapes us is so often brutal, the shape is a mere outline of what we are.
In the ringing of a bell, what we hear is not the striking of the apparatus, but the vibration of the metal, amplified by its shape. With Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar gives us poems that act as strike tones, allowing us as readers, as listeners, to hear the honest sound their violence creates. What is true is not always beautiful, but as it is put in the collection’s final poem “The Palace”: “Art is where what we survive survives.” So let the words of Kaveh Akbar into you, let the poetry in his glorious prayers build new floorboards and ceilings and walls around you, and let the sound that lingers after the last line fill everything that exists between them.
Andrew Walker is a writer from Denver, Colorado. His poetry and prose have appeared in Kissing Dynamite, Pidgeonholes, HAD, Crack the Spine, Eckleburg, and elsewhere. He reads poetry for No Contact and tweets as @druwalker94.