Gillian Sze, quiet night think: poems & essays

 

             When constructing our names, my mother used our English names as a constraint. She translated sounds from one language to another. When said aloud, my Chinese name sounds recognizably like its English counterpart. The first character of my name, jí, means “lucky.” One looks for its Pinyin (the romanized spelling of the Chinese pronunciation) in a dictionary will reveal that it shares the same sound as the words for “stammer,” “urgent,” “to draw (water),” and “to gather.” The second character, lían, refers to the lotus flower. Lían can also mean: “scythe,” “ripple,” “a hanging screen or curtain,” and “to connect.”

            I often think of the poetic work that goes into a name. Those careful tasks of composing, testing, titling, and finding the comparability between meaning and resonance, sound and connotation. My Chinese name placed me in a matrix of homophones, a riddle of notes composed of varying levels of coherence. I was part of a constellation, one among many possible significations. As I grew older, I saw myself as a book that my mother was first responsible for naming.

I’m fascinated by the way Montreal poet Gillian Sze weaves poetry, memoir and essay in her latest collection, quiet night think: poems & essays (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2022). The author of nearly a dozen poetry titles and three picture books [see my review of her second collection, The Anatomy of Clay, here], Sze’s quiet night think is a book of meditations though the lyric, writing on language, translation, poetry and becoming, writing out the slant ways she came to writing, and the construction, or even the capability, of a more comfortable and complete version of herself through the process. It is interesting to hear how her sense of language, culture and writing emerge from the same central core, prompting her before she was even conscious of how each might have been affecting her. As she writes:

            What is this space that poetry offers? Creative space. Emotional space. Reflective space. A space for possibilities. The poem, for a long time, remained a rigid slab of words with no room to make the leap. I wanted space, but I didn’t know then that to gain it, you have to lose something. Loss, as my mother already knew, is what provides the space from which meaning can emerge.

Very much composed and organized as a book of origins, quiet night think is constructed through a blend of memoir, essay, prose poem and lyric; as the press release offers: “six personal essays, poems, and a concluding long poem” composed by “a new mother, contemplating her own origins, both familial and artistic.” Threading through form, Sze allows the ebb and flow of the personal essay and the prose poem to explore far more than perhaps the single possibility of structure and form might have allowed. She writes of how her name became her body, and answers the interweave of “how she got here” through the lens of her family origins and history, existing through and between two languages and cultures, and the ways in which new motherhood simultaneously shifted, expanded and validated her perspectives on all of the above. She writes on how she first turned to writing, something that emerged as both the tether and the propulsion to her whole being. “Why do you write? was a question that I was often asked, and my answer for both weeding and writing was Rilkean: I must. Yes, there was something inherently futile with every weed I pilled, but I did so stubbornly, thinking of what Mordecai Richler said: Each novel is a failure or there would be no compulsion to begin again.” A bit later on, moving through those first few experiences of motherhood, she writes: “My mouth, usually a vehicle for coherent expression, was humbled; I suddenly found my body taking precedence, and where it went in those hours there were no words.”

Sze’s meditations are delicate, thoughtful and raw, articulating the complex experiences and emotions around new motherhood, writing out a space grounded by her own childhood, as well as a childhood revisited and reconsidered (as so many of us do) through the birth of her own first child. She works to articulate that delicate and exhaustive space through the haze, and for what her earlier self was presented as a conflict, but she manages to find the space for both. She not only finds space, but she crafts for herself, perhaps through the very nature of shifting into new motherhood, the perfect form that her thinking requires, allowing the multiple cultural threads and divisions of form to combine, compliment and inform each other, to speak through what otherwise would have been seen as contradiction. As she offers, early in the collection:

What are you trying to be? Western? my father said. I had just been told that I couldn’t attend the school dance. His rhetorical quip baffled me, not knowing how to respond at age twelve when, being born landlocked in the middle of the continent, the West was all around me. And yet, always that inescapable underlay of another country beneath our feet, a ghost asleep in the open yawn of the wok, the deft pluck of our chopsticks at my mother’s dumplings. My father once told me that in the fastened words of my hyphenated identity, “Chinese” came first. What I heard sounded like duty, outsider, order, difference.