Flying Blind

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In 1993, after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accord, Gary Geddes travelled through Israel with the blind poet and scholar John Asfour, he serving as Asfour’s eyes, Asfour as his tongue. The contrast between his friend’s competence in the sighted world and his own incompetence in Asfour’s Arabic world forced Geddes to ponder the blindness, physical and metaphoric, that is central to human nature.

The poems in Flying Blind meditate on seeing and not seeing in many ways. Flying Blind, the section documenting Geddes’s eye-opening trip, confirms his status as Canada’s foremost political poet, while the poems in the other three sections are riffs on sight and vision, some extended, some as trenchant as haiku.

AUTHOR

Gary Geddes

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies, including 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics, and won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize.

Reviews

In 1993, Gary Geddes travelled through Israel and Palestine with the blind poet and scholar John Asfour. The contrast between his friend’s ability in the sighted world and his own incompetence in Asfour’s Arabic world forced him to ponder the blindness that is so much a part of the human condition.

Flying Blind, Geddes’s sixteenth poetry collection, meditates on sight and insight, on personal and political loss. The sequence “Flying Blind,” which focuses on Geddes’s eye-opening trip, is complemented by prize-winning poems celebrating the wintry rockface of eastern Ontario, domestic fortitude in Australia, and fine discriminations of conduct in Japan.

“Geddes, who has written some of the finest political poetry of our time, knows how to celebrate the private without ever losing sight of the larger public issues.”
– Vancouver Sun

“Gary Geddes is undoubtedly the best of the contemporary Canadian poets I’ve read. Flying Blind is one of the best collections of poems published in English in recent years — not just in Canada, but anywhere. His work is achieved technically; it is moving; and, above all, it is interesting and accessible.”