In Painting the Borrowed House, Kate Rogers celebrates place without standing still. We move with her poems from becoming lao wei (foreigner) to being at home in “thinking about where / I’ve been and where I’m going next” (60) –even at those moments when we can’t wait to “be automatic.” One of the most striking aspects of the collection is the clarity with which it documents parallel processes of becoming lao wei and settling into a place where being automatic is a real possibility.
The book is divided into three sections, each associated with a particular place (though the third combines two) — “Becoming Lao Wei” (China), “Being Pale” (Hong Kong), and “Painting the Borrowed House” (Taiwan and Hong Kong). That three of the places are distinguished from China though all are China speaks volumes about the new China and about each of the places distinguished.
It is the mainland where the poet becomes a foreigner, an experience vividly captured in the first poem of the collection: “A child again, I am / alone with my myth of this country” (18). Like a child, the poet keeps pace with a Shanghai that is reinventing itself 24 hours a day. Like the child of “a lean mother, with no lap to sink into,” she learns practicality. Like a snake, she sheds her skin. All are images of beginning and beginning again, and those are as apt for China as for a stranger making the transition from passing through a place to living there. Images in the first section of the book are more vivid for being images of a child reinventing herself: “matching slippers slap / the pavement in a show of applause. And all these casual / loungers and strollers make nonsense of my old dream: kids / laughing at me because I’d worn a nightgown to school, / and passed no mirrors on the way” (21). This is a second naivete, making nonsense of one childhood while drawing on another to hear China as well as to taste it and see it.
The second section, too, makes space by drawing places together. While we learn Hong Kong with Rogers, she recalls Canada and dreams “of snow / muffling Hong Kong. Of flakes sifting down to glint in my hair, melt / their cold kisses on my cheeks. Of a darkening sky / shedding its stars, turning the universe inside out….” (29). This is more than nostalgia, more than an image of homesickness. It is an illustration of the way eyes formed in a place form other places, making old and new equally strange. The transition from “becoming” to “being” is not complete — and we have good reason to suspect it never will be. Recalling the image of being a child alone with the myth of a country, “Chung Yeung: Lamma Island 2006″ brilliantly evokes the settling into new myths that is part of making oneself at home, the other side of eyes formed forming: settling into new myths (new, at least, to the settler) transforms old eyes, here in the process of climbing a mountain: “we seek the highest point / to save ourselves and the family / friends have become, from historic danger” (34). Reenacting a myth is part of the ritual process by which friends become family and strangers become friends who are at home. The third verse of the poem transposes this to a cosmic level in the form of a question: “In twenty years, after the poles have melted, / the white bears of my northern / home become myth, / and the sea has reclaimed Hong Kong, / who will tell // the story of Chung Yeung? Who will offer / the children rainbows / as the flood waters rise?” (35) “A Book of Birds” (36-37), too, makes space between Canada and Hong Kong. The poet remembers her mother and writes “Gravity, momentum and other forces of nature brought me here. / Still, I often face north, feeling the pull of my country / and its raw bones full of iron. Think of my mother living / in opposite time, on the other side of the world” (36). That forces of nature brought her here (Hong Kong) as surely as they’d brought her as a child into Canada is another remarkable insight into the becoming that makes it possible to be at home.
The final section shares the title of the whole collection, and that title is a metaphor for the moment at which a borrowed house becomes home. Typically, one doesn’t begin painting until one is settled — though the house is still borrowed. That image is applied particularly to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and it highlights the extent to which Hong Kong has become the borrowed house in which Ryan is settled enough to paint. This in spite of the vivid evocation of earthquakes that “live on / in my body” (49) and (in the title poem) the observation that “a stairwell is simply a place to pause / before opening another door” (52). That pause flavors these poems: “These days my shadow is practicing / to be my ghost. It might prefer / to wander through cloisters with / submerged hands and invisible feet…. // …Become a tapestry / of myself in the Middle Ages. / But a stone cell loses / heat quickly as the light fades. / The single bed is too narrow / for my restless heart” (56, 57). The “Nunnery at Diamond Hill” gives the poet pause, but, being a traveler, she needs a different sort of hermitage.
In the second to last poem there is an image that casts considerable light on the whole” “I want to raise my camera, / capture the colours of their flight, / but will not startle with the flash. // Sitting on a low concrete wall, / I begin this poem” (58). One might think this is about birds, though it is about a group of “little nuns” receiving new robes. Rogers has published a collection of essays on birdwatching, conservation, and culture, so it is no surprise that her knowledge and experience in those areas would inform her poems. But it is particularly interesting that the poem takes the place of the camera here, precisely because the flash of the camera would spoil the scene — but the poem doesn’t. And that, I think, is startling enough to keep our eyes open even when we become sufficiently settled to become automatic in whatever strange places we inhabit.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Kate Rogers. Painting the Borrowed House. Hong Kong: Proverse, 2008. ISBN 978-988-99668-4-3
Labels: reviews
[ 0 comments ]
Nathan Brown’s Not Exactly Job stands in a long tradition of Biblical commentary that is at once conversation and poetry — poetry in conversation with poetry.
Don’t be misled by my calling it “commentary.” It is not academic — and it is certainly not sectarian. In fact, it’s not exactly “religious” in the way people often mean. It’s more like a conversation with a friend — and that’s a preaching style Brown probably soaked up in years of being immersed (as the son of a preacher) in a Southern Baptist tradition that has produced its share of “conservative” resistance to dealing “head on” with “hard-hitting” questions — but also pastors “in the true sense of that word” who (as Brown says of his father) have fielded “blunt questions” and “profane poems” with “grace, openness and wisdom.”
That could describe Brown’s response to the “profane” poem that is Job. In “Missing God,” he writes “Theologians wax prophetic all over / the obvious reasons God must have / for occasionally going on a vacation / …when He’s gone… / He’s just gone, man. / Yet I am not silenced / by the darkness” (23). And in “Ways to Survive,” “But you were a poet too, Job. / That’s why I read your book” (40). Job, Brown writes, “grieves like a poet . . . like a groping/ philosopher. And, even though I may not / know what he means, I feel like I do. / And I feel like he feels it too, more / than he knows” (26).
Like all Brown’s poetry, this little collection is filled with humor and grace, in spite of “bursting,” as he puts it, “out of a very dark time” in his life. Like Job, he ends with an epilogue: “And Elihu? God never even bothers / to speak the punk’s name. // And Job gets all his stuff back, / twofold — like a blues song gone wrong. / All his flaky friends come back to roost” (42). Brown’s collection ends where Job ends: “like God and Satan / had overextended the budget / and decided to wrap things up / quickly: // And so he died” (43).
As an added bonus, some of Brown’s black and white photos of western Oklahoma are interspersed with the text and featured on the cover, a reminder that, even in conversation with an ancient poem that more than one religious canon has struggled to contain, Brown’s work is a poetry of place, rooted in his experience of Oklahoma and the southwestern United States.
He’s talking with Job, but he’s hoping (as his preface suggests) that others who’ve been subjected to “the modern, conservative Christianity that reigns here in the Southwest” that “seldom if ever deals head-on with the true discussion, the hard-hitting questions that live at the heart of this Old Testament book” — particularly those subjected to it when dealing with “very dark times” — are listening in.
Given the state of U.S. politics and its impact on the world, that includes an audience of potential eavesdroppers far beyond Brown’s Southwest.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Nathan Brown. Not Exactly Job. Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9801684-0-2.
Labels: reviews
[ 0 comments ]
The three sections of viki holmes’s miss moon’s class — writing, arithmetic, and reading — each begin with an epigraph that serves as a signpost of sorts for a segment of the journey. The first is taken from the Dresden Dolls’ “Coin Operated Boy,” the second from Don Quixote, and the third from a blog entry on planetary linguistics. That sequence is a good indicator of just how surreal this journey will be. (Any collection that begins with a Brechtian Punk Cabaret is off to a good start!) Holmes is attentive to place as she moves from Cornwall to Wales, through Australia to Hong Kong; but these poems, suspicious of lines drawn on maps, are at home in a world of boundary crossing — “if you draw a map / the world still turns where your pencil // held it flat…” (83).
Holmes has an ear for the music of language and an eye for the shape of the poem on the page that, together, make this collection a delight for the eye and the ear of the reader.
Woven through the three sections of the book are three variations on a definition of love. The first tells us “it’s all about the traces we leave. the / need for something tangible to hold onto / – love never lasts quite long enough. so / you write it down, take a photograph. / some way of holding it in your memory / because there isn’t any other way of / making you feel quite like you’re really / living….” This is a prose poem with punctuation but no capitalization, where the lines break at margins that make it a single rectangular column in the center of the page — straighter visually than the journey that leads to the last sentence, broken over two lines: “there’s / nothing sadder than a misplaced always” (8). The second variation, in the section called “arithmetic,” takes the same form, though the perfect rectangle is broken by a single word — “balance” — on the last line. In the middle, Holmes writes “it is like being mapped out. she rolls / the taste of me around her tongue. she / is still trying to verify me….” (42). In these poems, mapping the world is a matter for the whole body: “she wants to measure out / the curve of my love. she wants me sugar / frosted, with both sides of my equations / balanced” (42). In the third variation, in “reading,” Holmes writes “how many ways to read ‘see you / soon’? love makes an archaeologist / of you; sifting through dusty heaps / of words to find the fragment that / will make sense of everything….” (79) Sifting through dusty heaps of words, the i of the poem (identified with the poet) is deciphering, then responding to, a letter: “i spent the / next three hours compiling a reply / of similar brevity. this works out as / about an hour per line. i have never / spent that long on a poem. the trouble / with archaeologists is that they have / lost their sense of perspective” (79).
Holmes does not lose hers, and the result is the kind of rootedness one might look for in a nomad at home on the road: “i would not miss what i have in my arms / nor look elsewhere instead of here” (18). Where else? In “the second mrs rochester,” the poet looks out of a new attic workspace at “a row of adolescents” leaning against the railing and text messaging — “one of the kids outside sets fire to the bin in the park / setting off a fever of text messages / a veritable mexican wave of them / they write here i say / looking out of the window…” She turns as “the smoke from the bin is rising / on a level with my attic.” Her back to the fire, she ends “they write here / why shouldn’t I?” (21)
In “the interrelatedness of things” (58), Holmes writes, “give me a lever and / a place to stand / and the universe / will move me.” She does, and it does, and the result is a pleasure. There are some wonderful experiments with shape — like the cup of Pu’er on p.63 — as well as sounds that we can roll on our tongues and insights that move us to new places marked by new perspectives — from “creation myths” in which “it is all mud, and soon / the rains will come” (76); through “new territory,” where “when you are in love / each bus stop raises / a lantern / just for you, and the rain / is always warm” (77); to “movement,” where “sometimes / the ground is / the back of a wet seal” (82); and “language lesson,” where the answer to what words are for is “to find where / a smile leads – / to the edges of ourselves…” (84).
And, finally, in “their rapt faces” (88), “the last line of his book / the middle of someone else’s life” — the last line of this book, in the middle, where we come in, grateful to stumble upon this lovely gathering of poems.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
viki holmes. miss moon’s class. Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2008. ISBN 978-988-99565-4-7
Labels: reviews
[ 0 comments ]
“The house we bought clings to the edge / of the irrigation ditch,” writes Sheila Black in “Oasis,” the first poem in House of Bone. It’s an apt beginning to this collection, for the canal that feeds the garden is also a gaping maw, a chasm. And in referring to “the beauty which is next to terror,” an allusion to Rilke, Black introduces a theme running throughout this first book of her poems. In “Palomas,” right under the speaker’s feet “glass splits into leaves /and blades. A can flashes like a wound.” In the long poem “Bitterroot,” the pain of childbirth is interwoven with a past involving drug use; the poem ends with “the red-gilled salmon, / the blue-speckled trout, / rising for the hooks dressed as flies / in feathers of yellow, sparks of green, beads of amber.” How to avoid a beautiful but lethal lure?
The subject of the difficulty of achieving and even defining health continues in the book’s second section, which opens with “Reconstruction,” where the speaker is lying in a hospital or recovery facility after corrective surgery, as her bones are “knitting themselves / into a new shape.” But the poet’s attitude toward the healing traced in the poems of this section takes a surprising turn, for, in “What You Mourn,” she feels “imprisoned in a foreign body,” missing the one that, although labeled “crippled” when she was young, “was simply mine.”
And yet, as painful as many of these poems are, tracing with unblinking honesty and courage a life lived close to the bone, these are also poems rich with the fruits of a vigorous life with a husband and young children. “Married Sex” traces a wife’s initial ambivalence toward physical intimacy that at first seemed mechanical and stale, followed by the sharp surprise of a new ecstasy. In “Tomato,” though the poet remembers once wishing her baby had never been born as he lay “blindfolded with a tube down / his throat,” she now rejoices in her healthy boy’s chomping on a ripe garden tomato “big as a heart.” In “Pasture,” the horses do not want to come in, but “hold the sweet grass smell forever in their nostrils.”
Although Black’s free-verse lines are not always as taut as one might wish, and although the language is not always as original as it might be, this is a first collection filled with “the unpredictability that makes / a thing alive.” “This is how I try to love the world,” Black writes in “Pearl,” and love it she does, throughout these often haunting, often luscious poems.
reviewed by Wendy Barker, University of Texas at San Antonio
Sheila Black. House of Bone. Cincinnati: CustomWords, 2007. ISBN 978-1-933456-62-1.
Labels: reviews
[ 0 comments ]
Among the greatest joys for readers and writers is sharing what we’re reading and writing. We pass on new discoveries to friends, and we keep lists (written or unwritten) of the books our friends (and interesting strangers) mention. Books rise to the top based partly on what we hear about them from people we think might lead us in interesting directions. For most of us, our lists grow faster than we can read–but that gives us one more reason to keep reading…
With that in mind, we’ve created this “reading room,” where virtual artists collective and friends post notes and reviews on what we’re reading and what we recommend — as well as occasional samples of what we’re writing. We invite you to browse as the archive grows (just follow the links in the sidebar to find notes and reviews from a particular month). And we hope you’ll take a look at the titles we publish (follow the “more” link next to the book cover in the sidebar) and visit our webpage for more information.
We invite authors and publishers to send books for review, and we welcome new reviewers. Check out the “books received” link for a list of books on hand — or send an email to let us know if there’s a book you’d like to review that’s not on the list.
Thanks–and enjoy!
vacteampoetry_at_earthlink_dot_net
http://vacpoetry.org
Labels: reviews
[ 0 comments ]
|
