Gillian Sze, An Orange, A Syllable

 

My comparison of language acquisition to some train, some countable linearity, is embarrassingly wrong. Baby language, I soon found out, was catachrestic. The child’s speech laid bare associations and accidents. In the tub, she would point to the eye of the toy whale and say, Moon. She would clamber up the stepstool and say, Tree. And when the child pointed to the cracks in the floorboards, she would say, Hole, followed by, Ow. Point to the hole in my sock and say, Hole. Point to the circles in the rug and say, Hole. Ow. All was lace. From the child’s small mouth, she undid the world around me.

Having been startled by how quietly good I thought her prior title, quiet night think: poems & essays (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], I was intrigued to see Montreal poet Gillian Sze’s latest, the poetry collection An Orange, A Syllable (ECW Press, 2025). As quiet night think: poems & essays was a blend of meditative, first person lyric prose and poems around the swirls and reconsiderations of self, culture and being that accompanied her new motherhood, this latest shifts those leanings back into the shape and approach of the poem a bit further down Sze’s narrative/parenting line. This is very much a sequel to that prior collection, offering further insights into culture, language, self and possibility through the ongoing lens of motherhood, partnership and domestic patter. “What were your words when the home was at a standstill? My love / is limited. The last dish fell from a cupboard. At a talk about love, a / scholar spoke about agape. I never considered the ordered and clean / conditions of agape, the superior, transcendent, unconditional love. I / did not know it.”

An Orange, A Syllable is built as an accumulation of lyric prose blocks, seventy-six in sequence. Occasionally there might be a symbol set atop one of these blocks, as to suggest a new line of thinking, a new sequence or cluster, five in total across the collection. Throughout, Sze writes of love, of language and the new ways she’s learned to approach and encounter, both within and beyond a domestic space that almost sounds set within the Covid-19 era: “What is out there? I think I have forgotten. My world thicks down / to the sweetness in each fold of laundry. The growing tower of cotton, / tidy and eversteady. For a while, I can stop thinking and let the hands / spread across the sleeves, the hems, the stitches. The hands know where / smoothness is right, know where to put the parts and when the folds / are finished.” Again, as a furthering of her prior collection, Sze writes of engaging language, her own background and self in new ways, engaging with the immediacy, and the layers one gains through attempting to communicate such to one’s children (with familiar echoes, certainly, of my own accumulation, through the book of smaller, of prose poems through and amid a similar period of domestic, parenting small children). To attempt to speak on any of this requires one’s own understanding, after all. This is a sharp and meaningful collection, and reason, once more, to go through that prior collection as well.

Dougong is an ancient Chinese method of interlocking wood. Watchtowers and temples and dynasties have been built completely without bolts, screws, or nails. All the wooden parts—beams, brackets, pillars—fit with precise carpentry. A dialogue, too, is putting a picture together, closing all the gaps. When one speaks and the other replies, words snap together. Meanings are understood and there is a satisfying “click.”