Place and liminality in Roger White's 'Notes Postmarked the Mountain of God'

In 1992, Roger White published his second booklet of poetry: a single poem in ten parts about his pilgrimage to Bahá’í Holy places in ‘Akká and Haifa titled ‘Notes Postmarked the Mountain of God’. For a fellow Bahá’í pilgrim, who has stood in those same spaces, White’s poetry has a remarkable ability to recreate the experience of place through language and form. At the same time, it evokes the ‘heightened sense of liminality’ which, Zachary Beckstead (2010) asserts, is felt by pilgrims. There is also a subtle interplay between the sense of the liminal and the sense of place as described by Aristotle (Physics IV), depending on the boundaries that are experienced in the various moments of the pilgrimage. In light of these considerations, this paper seeks to explore the ways in which poetry, place, and the liminal come together in White’s poem.