Imperial Nostalgias

Edwards’s latest—from its cover art to the poems, photographs, and fables inside—is one of the most commanding explorations of travel to arrive in American poetry in a long time, and one whose closest forebear, in light of its lyric chiseling and its philosophical depth, is Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel. Even after the preciseness of his poems and the impact of his questions, both of which are sustained throughout the collection, Edwards captures the emotional restlessness of the American everyman while moving from one poem to the next with the urgent calm of an international journeyman. “The song of our green-eyed family/ is a song about the bread we bake,” he writes, and then, just a few snapshots later, “You want to paint the world/ you were born into, but when you try// you’re only able to portray this one/ that will kill you.” As his title admits, Edwards is caught between the imperious American inside of him and the poet who needs to remember, to make a record of the beauty he’s witnessed. When he looks hard at America itself and misses “the bright feeling of belonging/ and the familiar patterns of my country,/ its virginity and schizophrenia,/ my several stolen bicycles,” Edwards announces himself as a poet who isn’t here to mine the exotic symbols of the world, but rather to speak to the homelessness that every citizen of the world has felt. (May)