An Emigrant’s Winter
By
Pui Ying Wong
Glass
Lyre Press
Glenview,
IL
ISBN:
978-1-941783-23-8
90
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Small
moments in the starkness of infinite space create their own palace of eloquent imagery
in Pui Ying Wong’s An Emigrant’s Winter. Stringing a plethora of similes
together, Wong constructs her architecture of muscular arches, lyrical spires,
and exquisitely positioned lattices within her picture-perfect stanzas and
flowing icicle-laden lines. Indeed, each multi-sided poem seems to defy gravity
by rising above us into the frigid atmosphere of faceted and timeless exhilaration.
Something
about the color pink on walls forewarns of troubled distractedness. Wong’s
collection opens with The Pink Apartment, a piece set in Sai Kung, a Hong Kong
township. The author’s persona considers with telling clarity her geographical
relationship with her native environs. Here she confronts the ambiguity of
origination,
I
was a stranger at home.
I
walked among
the
neighbors, quiet
as
an unstrung guitar.
I
waited for the bus, greeted
by
commuters wary like moles
caught
in the sun, nothing
could
assuage them:
not
morning’s pure light,
not
their own dreams.
Mnemonic
wanderings in the dreams of emigrants both unsettle and reassure their hosts.
In the title poem, An Emigrant’s Winter, Wong visits the phantoms of her past
in a land frozen in dream-time. At the heart of the piece the poet observes
from an intellectually connected, but emotionally isolated angle,
Icicles
teethed along the power line,
I
opened my mouth and my speech stuttered.
The
entire city lived in a snow globe,
even
big men trod timidly in the wind, hiding their faces
like
shamed felons caught by the TV camera.
The
market sold out of everything,
a
young boy the last pack of meat.
Sleet
fell all night, tapping
on
the windows the way the dead might.
In
my dreams I went back to the house
that
had forgotten about me,
no
one there asked how I’d been.
But
I sat with them just the same
Wong’s
poem Elegy For The Snow Country alludes to the power of literature on a young,
uncluttered mind. The poet recalls images of pure desperation from Yasunari
Kawabata classic Japanese novel Snow Country that she had once read. Snow
falling endlessly, she drifts into thoughts of her own and her son’s first snow
experience in a new country and then follows her own musing into an earlier,
albeit internal, setting. Interestingly, she describes herself as “like a
pilgrim” on a road of pure language. Wong concludes her piece this way,
What
other road if not language
that
can take us back to these moments,
to
childhood, that first country,
surrounded
by savage blue and steep inclines?
What
burns cannot be touched but remembered.
What
burns in this enigmatic life speeds before you
like
a train trundling out of the tunnel
into
a valley cold with stars.
Small
Moments, Wong’s lovely poem of emblematic images, details in miniature what the
rest of her collection does painted large. Her clarity of language and polished
similes are particularly striking. Her pieces, like a charm bracelet, seem to
be independent from one another except for a framing image of a girl learning
to ride a bicycle, which she divides into two separated stanzas. The tone and
the outcomes that Wong delivers remind me of the imagist poets Hilda Doolittle,
Amy Lowell, and even a bit of Ezra Pound. Consider these sections,
At
dawn, the train collects
the
commuters like debt,
returning
them in the evening
gleaming
of sweat.
Noon,
young mothers
sip
coffee in outdoor cafes,
united
by their fidgeting babies,
lack
of sleep and
a
distraction that has no name.
On
the ground of the VA hospital
the
gardener with a hose
harbors
a spray of rainbow
as
if it were a love letter
from
the front.
My
favorite poem in this collection Wong entitles The Search. The piece daubs one
with a strange duality of tone. The narrative background appears claustrophobic
and bolted in place, yet the lyrical overlay soars with magic. This tonal
counterpoint works really well, even as the poem ends darkly. The middle stanza
conveys a mix of faith and abnegation,
Moonlight
falls like a bolt
of
silk. On the moon’s face
the
blotches are the ones
we
see all our lives.
No
longer do we believe
in
the moon goddess
who
night after night
mixes
potions to make us
well.
What good is her benevolence
if
it won’t return the ones we lost?
Wong’s
master poem, In the Shadow of Pagodas, astonishes with its narrative pull and
lyrical lift. The poet tells the story of the first emperor of China, Qin
Shihuangdi, and his doomed court with versified aplomb. Man’s divine pretenses
in the form of art rise off these pages and flit before us in a wild
pre-blizzard warning. Illusion breeds dream breeds illusion. Replicas become
more real, more permanent than their creators. Wong describes the emperor’s
terra cotta army that accompanied him into the presumed afterlife this way,
Without
armies there would be no empire—
generals,
warriors, archers,
bowmen,
infantrymen,
even
if they were made of clay.
Figures
varied in size, poise,
their
color bright,
their
faces individual
as
if each were bestowed a spirit,
each
could breathe, could kill.
Not
only does the poet deliver philosophical depth and original images in this
collection, but she also gives us an emigrant’s perspective on traveling to and
from her new homeland. Wong’s poetic journeys shake us from sleep with their
wintry briskness. Truly, it’s eye-opening to travel with her.
