I DIDN’T
KNOW
I didn’t know my milk
could return racing
to save the orphan baby
this morning with ghosts
minor men and shook
the tricky omnivorous bandit
before it could bite again
Truck exhaust enters the house
One hydrangea flower
and
leaves gust in the wind
on “my” side of the fence (stolen)
The smooth cup is upheld by a brown
hand as if to say
Today
is the 70th anniversary
of the bombing of Hiroshima
New
from Toronto poet, editor and teacher Hoa Nguyen [see my 2012 profile on her here] is the poetry collection Violet Energy Ingots (Seattle WA/New
York NY: Wave Books, 2016), her first full-length collection since her
selected/collected poems, Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of such here]. For those keeping score, it’s been four years since the
appearance of a new full-length collection of poems by Nguyen—the poems from
her chapbook TELLS OF THE CRACKLING
(Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) are included here—back to her As Long As Trees Last (Seattle WA/New
York NY: Wave Books, 2012) [see my review of such here], and Violet Energy Ingots continues her work
in the small, personal moment, presenting a series of narratives stiched
together in coherent lyric collages of halting breaths, pauses and precise
descriptions. As she writes in the poem “Torn”: “To be original is to arise / from
a novel origin?”
The
short lyrics that make up Nguyen’s Violet
Energy Ingots quilt together into a sustained conversation around pop
culture, history, domestic matters and other concerns both large and small that
in her hands become intimate, whether referencing the 70th
anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Anna
Karenina, the song “Judy in Disguise,” Toronto trees, motherhood, the poet Philip
Whalen or the colour red. To preface a recent interview with Nguyen posted online at The Walrus, Toronto poet and critic Michael Prior wrote that:
Her poems often use carefully juxtaposed
phrases—images, fragments of dialogue, puns—in order to reveal the power
structures and ideologies embedded in the seemingly most innocuous of comments
and objects. Accordingly, Nguyen’s poetics are attentive to what she calls “the
constellations of influences and community.” Nguyen’s phrase captures the
striking allusiveness of her own work—in the first twenty or so pages of Violet Energy Ingots, the reader
encounters 1960s song lyrics, Hellenic furies, an Egyptian pharaoh, Jane Fonda,
and US poet Jack Spicer among many other literary and cultural figures past and
present.
No comments:
Post a Comment