Flying Blind

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.