Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac
by Anna Yin
Windsor, ON: Black Moss, 2016
116 pp, $17.00
Appreciation: Selected Poems
by Chuan Sha
Shijiangzhuang, China: Heibei Education Press, 2010
401 pp, £104.00; $213.00
Anna Yin hails from Nanjing, China. Immigrating to Canada in 1999, she is now the inaugural Poet Laureate of Mississauga, Ontario. Born in Chongqing, China, Chuan Sha studied in England, then came to Canada in 1999. Settled in Scarborough, Ontario, his poetry has international appeal.
Yin’s sixth verse collection is Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac. She’d planned to write a book titled, “The Year of the Snake,” for 2013 was a year of faith-testing crises. However, other Chinese astrological fauna came to mind, resulting in a more expansive work. Indeed, Yin is the poet as seer. Her models are other bards with an eccentric and/or imagist bent: Anna Akhmatova, Basho, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, William Carlos Williams….
She also shadows Sylvia Plath: “Someone from our childhood mistook me for you— / his apology blew me back into midnight.” A friend has become une-dame-de-la-nuit: “You drifted away into a night lake— / with feathers blackened by dark lust, / with slim neck hooked by golden bait.” In another poem, the speaker says, “You are tired of his / molding, over and over, / thrashing, nailing / into you.” There’s a fierce feminism here, reinforced by readings of Dot Livesay and Dame Atwood. Though it’s tricky following Yin’s wicked, impressionistic juxtapositions, her painterly imagery is deliciously lustrous.
See her haiku poems: “you stare at a white house…” / white smoke lingers / among white-framed windows”; “recalling a poem / his shadow and mine expand / on Brooklyn Bridge.” Do not ignore her acute aphorisms: “Death. What is it like? / No one takes a close look.”
Yin is endlessly perspicacious, endlessly compelling: “The autumn gusts feel warm / as if it’s spring…. / last night by accident I cut my finger… / slowly, on the rice paper, red roses grew.” She brings to Canadian poetry a sense of classicism and aestheticism and minimalism, all nicely mixed up with sensuality.
Chuan Sha’s partly English book, Appreciation: Selected Poems is hefty at 400 pages, pricey, and priceless as a record, via Chinese commentary and English translations, of the impressive works of a man who is currently Director of the Chinese-Canadian Poets Association.
Li Yong Yin’s intro attests to Chuan Sha’s “passion (for) wildness, … madness for beauty, and (revels in) love and lust.” The critic feels “the essence of (Walt) Whitman, and also the spirit of Allen Ginsberg.” Chuan Sha’s verses do hover between Victorian Romanticism—delight in Love and Nature—and Beat Movement passions, namely Sex and Travel. (Compare his works with two last-century classics by Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveller in London [1938] and The Silent Traveller in New York [1950].)
Chuan Sha’s lines describing yearning and loss are striking: “Tragedy came when adults took control / The heart became sullen / The voice frozen / Like a fossil…. // Your hair combed in bangs / You gazed with shining black eyes / At the water pushing the boat into the east.” “Christmas” is une-belle-dame-sans-merci, who struts, “Barebacked, with a low dress, flaunting provocative legs from under the short skirt,” while “throngs of corpses circle about …, flirting.” The speaker feels she’s “taken away my heart from which blood still drips….”
A visit to London (UK) reveals, “Reflection of silver and platinum / Blondes’ blue eyes sensual legs and breasts / Arrays of naked bodies lying in the Nature Club / Civilization is but a moon floating / On the surface of the sea.” Echoes of Gabriel Garcia Lorca and Arthur Nortje resound: “Your black hair pours down covering / your pure white body.” How many other fine, Chinese poets go unheard among us, silent in English, but singing lustily in Chinese? Them that have ears, why, they will hear.
Standard Candles
by Alice Major
Edmonton, AB: U of Alberta Press, 2015
164 pp, $20.00
Fifty Scores
by Arthur Bull
Toronto: Teksteditions
$17.00
Alice Major’s ninth verse collection is Standard Candles. The Scot-Canuck ranges widely—cosmically—across subjects in this handsome, substantial (164 pages), and beautifully accomplished work. A “Late” Metaphysical might be the best way to describe Major, for her poems often employ scientific terms and metaphors to elaborate her truths and ideals. However, the poems remain accessible, for the science references get explicated either in situ or in several pages of Notes that close the volume.
Nicely, some poems are simply descriptive. “The god of teapots” is “corpulent and unworried,” accepting “what pours in” and next pours out: “amber, tan, sepia, / the percolations of brown, / the brewed color of peat, / muskeg, spruce bog, / wetlands.” Similarly, in “Four questions for winter,” we learn snow’s identity: “Moon’s admirer and echo, / friend of white owls.” This is plainsong imagery. The poem ends magically: “Where do I love you? / Here.”
To name poets that Major resembles, one must list the philosophical Jan Zwicky and the science-oriented Jan Conn and/or the Christian Platonist Peg Avison or the Gothic Outdoorswoman Peg Atwood. Yet, Major’s more playful and more moving than this quartet. The unpromisingly titled, “Rectangularization of the morbidity curve,” is, really, a fine elegy, one that escapes from actuarial concepts to picture dying as a swansong: “Then I think of curves—the gull’s wing drawn / from lifting shoulder to the tapered tip / trailing its final feather into air. A line / lovelier, perhaps, than that sharp edge / of rock plunging to ocean.”
The last poem is humorous: “God submits a grant application to the Canada Council.” Anyone who has ever applied to the granting agency for funds to support an artistic project will appreciate God’s dilemma in seeking money “To create a world.” Answering the “Detailed (Project) Description” that the Canada Council demands, God pledges “a multi-disciplinary, cross-genre work,” so as to produce “a self-sustaining, performative experience based on the geometry of the sphere.” Moreover, the work will involve “theoretical mathematics” and “theatrical techniques.” The actual performance—an installation—will take a week to set up. God’s grant is approved, and She is awarded the maximum amount: $25,000. She is pleased, but She wonders how she will live on that, for her masterpiece will have to last for at least 14 billion years.
Standard Candles (an astrological term) is a trove of non-standard—exceptional—poems, whose brilliance is not “bee violet” (a zoological term), but blazingly evident. The Albertan Major was Edmonton’s first Poet Laureate. Her laurels ain’t gilt, but pure—Troy-ounce—gold. Arthur Bull is the antithesis to Major. The Nova Scotian poet doesn’t want to microscope stars or telescope trees; he wants to hear, instead, the jazz of everyday doings. Fifty Scores is just that: 50 ways of listening to the heavenly sounds of earthly existence. These poems could be yoga instructions for the ears.
Here’s #5: “On a windy day, stand by a brook in the woods near the ocean. / Move your attention from foreground (brook) to middle ground / (branch-wind cracking-soughing) to the background (surf), before / gradually letting the small sounds of the forest break in.”
#7 is modeled on soul singer James Brown: “Find an echo in the valley or against a building, and test it, measuring / the interval with the loudest, shortest wordless sound your voice can / make. Yell once, twice, three times, four times, as far as you can go / and still get back to its complete echo.”
#11 is a cuisine soundtrack: “While chopping vegetables like carrots or parsnips, attend to the / ‘sshh’ of the knife going through with the ‘kkk’ as it hits the cutting / board, arranging the rhythm and tempo to the sound of oil heating in / the wok.”
I’ve added line-breaks, but the pieces are prose poems. Who does Bull echo? Experimental composers like John Cage and R. Murray Schafer. Plus whimsical poets like bill bissett and ee cummings.
#39 is fun: “While undressing someone else, follow the sequence of clothing / music: Velcro, snaps, zippers. This also works as a duet.”
