The Double Lamp of Solitude

The word periplum appears on the first page of The Double Lamp of Solitude, Joshua Edwards’s artfully layered new volume of poetry, prose, and photography. An English coinage attributed to Ezra Pound, it refers to a perspective or mapping borne from the center of a traveler’s (originally a seafarer’s) subjectivity. Throughout this book, which meditates on reading and writing, solitude and intimacy, and time (and its attendants, history and change), Edwards plays with perspective, leaning in to the traveler’s point of view—using the “eye” as a camera to describe “present pleasures / anchored in the past,” the quotidian, the road—while also stretching, with subtle poetic craftsmanship, the limits of his own subjective mapmaking. Sometimes, using the second person, he casts the reader into the periplum.

The collection opens with “Three Landscapes,” a series of prose pieces, each of which trace, in text and image, a long walk from a poet’s birthplace to the site of his death. If walking presents a way of “reading” the landscape, photography and writing offer ways to translate it. Edwards follows the paths of Friederich Hölderlin, Federico García Lorca, and Miguel Hernández, respectively, and interpolates his accounts with the authors’ poems, in the original German and Spanish, and in his translations. 

Without fanfare, Edwards makes the argument that translation is writing, that the texts (and, in this case, images) a writer-translator finds most resonant, works they’ve read, translated, or written, can “radiate through time” together, making visible a personal web of allusion and association. Of course, translation itself can be a “double-lamp of solitude”: two writers, in different rooms and at different times, write the same poem by their own lights.

Later in the book, the lyric poems in the series “Lamps” seek out or gesture toward that which illuminates a particular domain. In “The Double Lamp of Poetry,” the collection’s themes, and the paths a single life might take, converge. We learn, for example, how it’s not just in the writing of a poem that something is uncovered, but that reading, too, can be revelatory:

                                        [. . .] Reading
a poem may be a kind of confession:
I is another at an arm’s length away,
somebody who made sitting alone 
their personality. What convinced

me to live this way? Which love?