Gillian Bickley is at her best when she lets the everyday surprises of multicultural, multilingual Hong Kong speak for themselves — as in the “prophet’s message” on a lamp-post “where usually the police affix notices / seeking witnesses of fatal accidents” (“You can be like God,” 71). In English and in Chinese, the message reads: “We are all in danger. Blameworthy / are the dangerous drivers, who do not / stop at the lights. If you drive carefully, / you can save a thousand lives. / You can be like God.”
This is a found poem, and Bickley makes something of it with a question after her own judgment: “Such an exhortation to huge ego, / spiritual ambition and eschatological power!” she writes, then asks “– Could it work more / than the now standard, / stern, finger-wagging command, // ‘Do not drink and drive!'”
Roughly halfway through the book, in “Waving Goodbye” (69), the writer panics “for a moment” at the realization that “they are moving further away / into the separateness / that death brings.” “They” remain unnamed, but we flash back to the first poem and see the whole collection as a list of things here to share with those (including the parents who visited only once) who are elsewhere.
Readers who know Hong Kong will recognize the juxtapositions in the list — and may suspect that “being like God” resides in the ability to stop long enough to be surprised by them. Readers who don’t will get a sense of the place from these matter-of-fact observations that linger right on the edge of prose.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Gillian Bickley. China Suite and other Poems. (with a reading by the author of all poems on 2 CDs). Hong Kong: Proverse Hong Kong, 2009. ISBN 978-988-17724-9-7.