The cold hard ground

Eyeless in Gaza Again
by Gary Geddes

N.p.: World Beyond War, 2025
$0.00

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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At the end of this collage of poems about the Western world’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction, there are no selves. In their place, there is Gary Geddes’ realization that the self-confidence of his Western self stands aside from the horrors of conflict thousands of years old, even if it feels that his tools can resolve it or understand it. The tools include poetry. Geddes’ answer is such a narrative as “Moses Among the Rushes,” spoken less by Geddes than by a camera. Here’s how that looks: 

I notice a stranger has co-opted
my face, my voice. I watch,
appalled, as this imposter
invades the small screen.

The resulting shifts in point of view across decades are alienating. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapucinski, who left journalism after it became television, had a related criticism. Embedded journalists who could report accurately from Africa because they knew the local stories inside out were replaced in the 1980s by TV personalities with a camera operator and a live feed from a producer in New York telling them what to look at because it would sell views.

There’s been a lot of that in Gaza. Geddes’ workaround, exemplified by “Homeland,” is to narrate through the gaps between moments, jumping from papers not in order at a checkpoint to:

Where does the soul
reside—marsh grasses, God’s ear, or
that tender hollow at the base
of the lover’s throat?

The plots of fiction and journalism don’t move forward like this. They rely on characters reacting to crises. Lyric poems act by transforming subtexts. “Moses Among the Rushes” concludes, for example, with the defeat of witness so proudly held thirty years before:

The documents I smuggle out
on video cassette have aged as much
as they’ve distorted all I’ve seen.

The Austrian lyric novelist Peter Handke was in a bind like this after he went to Serbia (the aggressor) during the Bosnian War. When he wrote of Serbs with compassion, presenting their point of view instead of reporting on genocide in Bosnia, he was slammed.

That there were terrible massacres is not in doubt. Nor that a year after Handke’s reputation was shattered, German investigators revealed that the story of the genocidal camp had been a fabrication, created by a reporter angling to be picked up by the BBC. The story was then amplified by other reporters accepting its visual narrative at face value. The genocide had happened—but elsewhere. 

A major criticism levelled against Handke was that he was reporting as a poet might, and was simply too inexperienced to know that poetical enquiry was exactly the wrong perspective for reporting on conflict and the job should be left to the professionals thought to possess better understanding.

There’s quite a lot of irony in that judgement. I mean, even if Handke got some things wrong ethically, the professionals erred even more. 

Geddes (The Oysters I Bring to Banquets) walks the line better. The contemporary battles in Gaza are so fraught that whatever the tangles of ethics unwind to, there is a peace plan during which the killing goes on. Television, though, has turned away.

Geddes’ path out of such blindness is to choose protest: he will join a group of “old lefties,” holding up placards. In other words, he does what old men, bewildered, can do: stand for an ethical point of view within long memories, and hope that the gesture travels well.

Maybe it does. Geddes isn’t the first Canadian to walk this path. In the same struggle, in 1970 in the same troubled part of the world, in London after a stint in wartime Israel, Montreal-based performer Leonard Cohen reversed the roles of the blind and the seeing by singing to the memory of a blind panhandler in New York: “Please don’t pass me by, / for I am blind, but you can see.”

That year, Cohen also famously calmed a rioting mob at a music festival on the Isle of Wight by declaiming calmly at 2am, “All this land will be ours someday, but not yet. We aren’t strong enough yet.” The mob apparently grew hushed.

It looks like we are still not strong enough. Whether British Columbians are protesting in favour of Palestine or Israel or in favour of both at the same time, Geddes” realization in Eyeless in Gaza Again is that the belief that a Canadian has the wisdom to settle these things is illusory.

At the root of all Western poetry since 1945 is Theodor Adorno’s declaration, “All poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” Pop culture has continually translated this refusal to sidestep the special nature of the Holocaust as “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.”

Of course there can. By barbarism, Adorno meant “outside the code of civilized behaviour,” which to him was outside the international communist community that stood against the divisions and dehumanizations of nationalism, nativism, and genocide. Adorno wanted to abolish aesthetic values—lyrical values—in favour of people in community. He likely had his eye on the exquisitely lyrical Gottfried Benn, a most post-WWII German poet, who had thrived under Nazism as much as in the culture that followed. To Adorno, Benn’s use of decoration and compression, the two modes of Western lyric poetry, would have represented a troubling continuity. That the continuity would have also been a response to horror, Adorno missed.

Geddes gets it. At times, his poems are in populist’s oral style, like in this excerpt from “A Letter to Mr. Netanyahu”:

Dear Benjamin: I hold you responsible
for the destruction of Gaza, and even
for the security breach that permitted
the terrible October 7 attack. Decades
of illegal settlements in occupied
territories, the wall, insults, bombs
and constant humiliations were bound
to explode in a deadly slave revolt:

At times, they wail in high literary language, as with “In which I assume, recklessly, the mantle of Augustine”:

Corporeal light
distorts, its dangerous sweetness
makes me colour-drunk; and
paintings, Lord, bold, concupiscent
in their revelation, hymn mef
rom devotions.

To these traditional Canadian gestures, Geddes adds contemporary slam tricks of endings with pop cultural bombs, like the blurring of a high literary comma at the ending to “Rocks of Judea”:

Twin sphinxes. We’ll lie forever,
side by side, free at last
of politics, gender.

Geddes knows how to work a crowd.

The central conceit that Geddes uses to set aside his unreliability as a privileged viewer is blindness. In the sequence “Flying Blind,” he tours the Middle East after the now-failed Oslo Accords (1993 and 1995). With him is the poet John Asfour, who became a poet after he lost his sight to a bomb he was playing with as a boy. At that moment, Geddes gave up playing at being a wise peacekeeping Canadian with an intellectual arsenal drawn from the tools of an elite literature.

During the current destruction of Gaza, he gave it up again. It was a necessary lesson, yet presented overly harshly. After all, by the 1960s, Adorno was arguing that there is a place for art and poetry, because art that portrays beauty draws people to the Earth, and so protects them by protecting it. Geddes has beauty like that. In “Green Line,” for instance:

For a while the salt taste of your shoulders
sustained me. I waited in line
before the single tap in the water-
main and did not yet envy
the freedom of migrating
birds.

The lyric is complete, yet rapidly unfolding events and poetic fashion compel him to extend it with meditation:

I read the history of my time
on tombstones. Epigrams,
not epics. Life pared
to the bone. A child fallen
in the street, struck
by a single bullet.

This horror of a world outpacing lyricism ages him. His response? He retrieves the lyrical mode with “I kiss your blessed hands.”

He’s right. Love (as an active energy) is not politics. Not all barbarian cultures (The word “barbaros” is Greek for “foreigners.”) are uncivilized. Only a culture locked into its own point of view might make the error of calling them so. 

In the end, Geddes holds up his simple provincial Canadian slogan with the old lefties of Duncan, “these flowers of dissent” (he writes in “The Faithful”), even though he can’t see through the tiles of the square to the “solid ground” below.

Geddes might have an eye on that cold hard ground, but, lucky us, he’s not ready yet to return to it. The sign that he is holding up? This publication. Social life is not sight. It is each other.

One more thing: the book is a gift. You can download it here.



[Editor’s note: via the author — “The pieta cover image, courtesy of Reuters, is by the award winning Palestinian photographer Mohammed Salem and it won World Press Photo of the year in 2024. Below the image, the information says: “Inas holds the body of her niece Saly.”]

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has reviewed recent books by Tom McGauley, W.H. New, Stephanie Bolster, Lorne Daniel, Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, and Hari Alluri for BCR. His newest volume, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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