Inhaling the Silence
By Anna Yin
Oakville, ON: Mosaic, 2013
68 pp. $18
Allegheny, BC
By Rodney DeCroo
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2013
96 pp. $19
Anna Yin is Chinese by birth, Canadian by choice, and English in (second) language. Inhaling the Silence is her second book; Wings Toward Sunlight (2011) was her first. She received the Ted Plantos Memorial Award in 2005. Introducing Yin’s new book, poet and scholar Richard (Rick) Greene observes that the “deepest roots” of her poetics are “Chinese, and she achieves her finest effects by mysterious juxtapositions.” He names Yin’s antecedents as “‘H.D.’, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and even Wallace Stevens.”
Yet, Yin herself inks poems in homage to Canuck bards Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page, and she quotes Anna Akhmatova and Federico Garcia Lorca. She owes something to the extended lyricism of Layton and Page, while also imitating the cryptic politics of Akhmatova and the populist balladry of Cohen and Garcia Lorca. Educated in science at Nanjing University, Yin must know Mao Zedong’s poem, “The People’s Liberation Army Captures Nanjing” (1949), and its victorious, martial rhetoric capped by an imagistic aphorism: “Man’s world is mutable: / Seas become mulberry fields.” Many of Yin’s poems, in Inhaling the Silence, are first tentative exercises, fielding hit-and-miss images, even clichés, but then clinching a triumphant conclusion vastly superior to the preceding words.
An example of this feinting/striking approach is “The Night Garden.” Yin imagines the night sky as “dark chocolate branches” a-stretch, with “her moon face” a-float, and stars brimming “crystal wine.” Though individual images are, well, pretty, the effect of the whole is confusion (night is stretching branches, a female face is floating, while stars are somehow overflowing with wine) or cliché (“crystal wine”).
A stanza later, the passable line, “Tides chime and fish submerge,” precedes cloying exoticism: “Lush forest and plump fruits scent.” A “silver river” appears next. But the poem succeeds to a powerful stanza: “We have come this far / and find each other / closer / then burst into blossoms / in this night garden.” “Mourning for Iris Chang” takes ten lines, yet it needs only three: “Beneath plum boughs, / petals shroud the ground / as last night’s snow.” The final line is even better if “as” is cut. Yin will become greater as her poems become stricter.
Rodney DeCroo’s Allegheny, BC, is a debut collection of verse that builds upon the lyrics of his album, Allegheny, which has earned him notice as being one of Canada’s best folk-alt-country songwriters. Raised in the coal-mining wilds of Pennsylvania, but Vancouver-based for the past 20 years, DeCroo’s lyrics recall the harshness of his rural, working-class, Allegheny riverside childhood and youth, and a further troubled youth in hardscrabble, back-country British Columbia.
The poetry is likely distinct from the song lyrics in that, while often cut into recognizable quatrains or quintains, the poems don’t rhyme. But their content presumably echoes the songs. If so, they hearken back to Bob Dylan—early Dylan, that is, still imprinted by Woody Guthrie. Taking DeCroo at his words (pun intended), these poems are blank ballads about booze, beatings, and broads; or losers, labour, and liquor; or dirt, drink, and death. Et cetera… DeCroo is relentless in remarking on pain, poverty, and pollution—inner and outer.
The Allegheny River is a site of “huge rats” and “dead carp and catfish” rotting “in a wash of yellowish scum”; kids in the coal-dig towns have rock fights, using “small stones / hardly bigger than pebbles,” but still capable of wounding: “I held my hand to my face // and when I brought it back / to look, it was bright with blood.”
Country life can be lousy. DeCroo recalls “My uncle’s huge, // scarred hands wielding his greasy bible, / my aunt’s thin, feral-cat face. / Clinging to their wrecked farm / like ghosts jealous of the living, / except for church or groceries, / they seldom left that dessicated ground.”
The poems are nicely spare, plain-wrought; the images are as clear and cutting as glass shards: “The bear began to cough as its sides heaved, // blood swamping its lungs.” DeCroo is heir to Al Purdy and Milton Acorn: calloused troubadours.
