Most of us assume that clarity is what we want and confusion is what we suffer. Dave Bonta's "Passage to Exile" turns that around. Its speaker belongs to a "we" who have grown comfortable in the fog and are rattled when it lifts. Set, according to its subtitle, in Highgate Cemetery, London, the poem moves from a weather report about "the temperate regions" to a sharp little accusation: poets are hated because they "remind us we're all in exile from our dreams." Its central idea is that evasion, meaning irony, caution and vagueness, is a quiet form of banishment. No one has been driven out. We have walked away from what we once wanted, and we call it good manners.
The opening plays on the word "temperate." It describes a climate, but it also describes a temperament, a moderate and unextreme way of living. "Blurriness" works the same way, as a literal haze and as a moral and emotional vagueness. Then comes the oddest image in the poem: when the air is too clear, the speaker walks "like a drunk, / hesitating & veering around sharp-edged shadows / that come alive when they move." Drunkenness usually means blur, yet here sharpness causes the stumbling. Clear light makes the shadows hard-edged and a little menacing, and the speaker, who has lost the habit of seeing plainly, swerves around them. "Too bald a truth appalls us" says the same thing in a single flat line. "Bald" suggests something stripped of ornament, and "appalls" has an old link to growing pale, so the sentence carries a small flinch.
The form supports all this. The poem is one unbroken block of fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but it has no rhyme and no steady metre. It sounds like someone talking, and the line breaks do careful work. "I can't remember the last time I spoke / unironically of love" holds back its key adverb until the next line, so the reader feels the speaker's hesitation. The two ampersands add a casual, jotted-down feel. The repeated "We are used to" at the start of line 1 and line 9 acts like a refrain, and it makes the habit of acceptance sound like a chant.
The middle of the poem sets up a world of watching and play. The "paraplegic angels" are most likely cemetery statues, though that is an inference from the setting. The phrase is startling because it makes the guardians crippled, unable to act, and then puts them "over closed-circuit TV," so protection has become surveillance. The next line gives a domestic scene: "Our children play hangman with blackboard and chalk." Hangman is a word game whose losing move is a drawn execution, and it shows children learning language alongside a casual rehearsal of death. It fits a cemetery poem well, since in hangman every missed letter brings the gallows closer.
Then comes the turn. "Listen" is the only direct address in the poem, and it breaks the circumspect tone the speaker has just said is "best." The poets are accused of carrying "empty wash tubs instead of roses." Roses are the traditional gift of love, pretty and a little sentimental. Wash tubs are plain, working objects, and these are empty. Perhaps they suggest labour and cleansing, or perhaps they are simply vessels with nothing in them, a refusal to dress up loss. The poem doesn't explain, and the image sticks because it stays practical and strange.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it catches itself in the act. The speaker admits to avoiding sincere speech, yet the last two lines are about as unironic as a sentence can be. The poem therefore becomes the sort of poet it describes, one who arrives with a bare truth and no flowers. "We hate poets here" also quietly includes the speaker, who is part of that "we." The title gives the idea its final shape. A "passage" can be a corridor between graves, a journey, or a stretch of writing, and "exile" turns out to be something we travel into without noticing. For students, the poem is a good example of how a loose, conversational style can still carry a sharp argument, and how a few odd images can say more than a statement would.