Chuqiao Yang, The Last to the Party

 

Pompeii

The Lupanar walls speak of a woman,
her art was intercourse.
Here, once, she left lovers to quiet deaths
on hard beds, sharp edges softened,
vestiges of a century of pleasure.
A caged, beautiful bird of prey, a tourist imagines.
But you’d almost think the walls spoke
of a woman whose art was praying,
back turned to a man, knees bent,
body arched, god-searching.
A brave, dying bird of prayer.
Colours, clay, heat, Pompeii’s countryside
burning down her body, the walls speaking
of a woman whose art was pleasure;
exhalations come a long way,
remnants of her existence,
her worship painted on the walls,
les petities morts in the history of lost lives,
little deaths in the history of survival.

There are long-awaited debuts, and then there are long-awaited debuts, such as Chuqiao Yang’s The Last to the Party (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, 2024). Born in Beijing, raised in Saskatchewan and currently living in Ottawa, Chuqiao Yang is a poet I first discovered in the summer 2010 issue of Grain magazine (Vol. 37.4) [see my review of such here] as part of Sylvia Legris’ stunning and maddeningly-curtailed run as editor there. The Last to the Party follows Yang’s bpNichol Chapbook Award-winning Reunions in the Year of the Sheep (London ON: Baseline Press, 2017) [see my review of such here], a number of poems from which have been reworked and folded into this larger collection. In one of the finest debuts I’ve read in some time (tied with Ottawa poet Ellen Chang-Richardson’s Blood Belies, which I’m currently reading as well), Yang writes of a prairie childhood, various travel, family and family roots and youthful adventures, rebellions and reconciliations, her lyrics offering a richness that is confident and subtle, considerations so clearly evident even in those poems published in Grain, fourteen years back. “Sometimes I float backwards,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “The Party,” “ten times / over the South Saskatchewan / until I’m only kite bones / and promise: watch me, / a mawkish pre-teen pedalling / uphill, licked by rime, / peering into a neighbour’s window.”

Set with opening poem, “The Party,” followed by four numbered sections of poems, Yang has a painter’s ability to evoke a scene, whether landscape or portrait. She writes of moments turned and returned to, or recalled, turned and turned over, to better see, or see differently, attempting a fresh perspective on something that clearly won’t let go. Consider the short poem “Phaethon,” the first half of which reads: “I dreamt my father was alive. // Old, but happy, just // as I had left him. // He was bicycling.” She writes of foreign travel and prairie landscapes; she writes of roads home, and roads that lead away, and the realization that these are but the same roads, even before and beyond the clarification of what home means, and where, from Ottawa to Saskatchewan to Beijing, centred around friends, partners, parents and grandparents.

There’s a thread of wistfulness, and even melancholy, that runs through these poems, as Yang articulates intimate distances, drifts and attempts to connect or re-connect. She writes of a closeness that never quite feels close enough, or is never meant to last, but occasionally, unexpectedly, might or even does. Listen to the lines of the wedding-poem “Epithalamium,” a poem that ends: “And while there may be // years so full of sadness // you will be reluctant to trek // the dogged trail ahead, // you will reach for each other’s // hand, feel the other’s pull, // and you will be at ease.” She writes of a lifelong search for connection and belonging, and of finally landing at a moment that allows itself that comfort. Her poem “Friday,” a piece that immediately follows “Epithalamium,” includes: “Now, we share the same space, and life is a wide, / paved driveway.”