Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Marick Press
ISBN 10: 1-934851-12-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-934851-12-8
Paperback: 78 pp
Water the Moon
Review by Mia
At the tip of every tongue,
the wind, a chasm —
desire enters the forest.
—Biography of Hunger
I ran into a harpist the other day—at an airport of all places. She was in the middle of the terminal and it was hard to miss her. So entranced was I by watching her hands scale the strings and listening to the most ambient music fly off her fingers I almost missed my flight. I won’t say it sounded like water, or some such contrived metaphor. Rather, it was what leaves might sound like if they could be plucked from the attenuated branches of a willow, tuned to weeping chords. As it turned out, the musical composition that the harpist wrote herself was about leaves falling. I had somehow made this iconic association without knowing how that synthesis came about.
Now after having read WATER THE MOON my thoughts drift back to the harpist. It’s not because the poems in WATER THE MOON are lyrical or musical to my ears, even though there are many poems that allude to music. The poems in WATER for the most part are personal narrative poems; i.e., they tell stories from a personal point of view. I return to the poet, Fiona Sze-Lorrain and the harpist because both are skillful “story tellers”: One ‘tells’ us the season of leaves, the other tells us about seasoning red azuki beans in My Grandmother Waters the Moon.
I was enthused about wanting to read this book, but I wasn’t prepared for the richness of details, the layers embedded in complex movements, and the provocative nature of the poems. In some ways, I feel inadequate to write up this review. For one thing, there’s a preponderance of history I’m simply not well versed in: What I know about Chinese/East Asian history could fit into a thimble. Take a look at the fourth poem in the book, A Talk with Mao Tse-tung:
Our most esteemed Chairman Mao,
there are days when I thought I heard you
on the rooftop of a palace at dawn
waving to the sky and mouthing some words
echoed by Red Guards in hysterical chants.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker of the poem asks:
What are slogans, tell me the answer, what
are words and why do they poison
spirits and minds, though you slept with
books and the nation buried them?
The picture I have of a Mao Tse-tung is cobbled together from articles and mostly hearsay. Mao is regarded by many as “a great revolutionary, political strategist, savior of the nation, military mastermind; as well as, a poet, philosopher, and visionary.” Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. It is also generally accepted that Mao’s social-political programs caused severe famine and the deaths of between 50 to 70 million people. One has to wonder who was Mao exactly? How does a leader of a country who has caused the deaths of millions of people be regarded as important, as a poet?! Was Hitler a poet? He was only responsible for 6 plus million deaths.
In the penultimate stanza:
Clearly history has no last word.
They sweep it away by weighing pros and cons.
No one refutes you made the nation red, for
tourists never cease to swarm the Great Wall.
I want to know, who “They” are— second line in the above stanza. But I realize I am asking the same questions as the speaker. I am weighing the pros and the cons, I am, “They.” And the ironic observation, “tourists never cease to swarm the Great Wall,” is simply splendid. In the line before, “No one refutes you made the nation red” – one naturally assumes that the speaker is alluding to Communism, but red could also imply blood, hence death.
Finally, the last stanza:
I do not believe in a weeping nation,
I do not believe in her mourning people.
Do you see immortals in golden robes?Do you dream of dead kingdoms?
Forgive this comparison, but don’t those lines echo, Ozymandias written almost two centuries ago? “Do you dream of dead kingdoms?” the speaker asks. I just love that entire stanza if you count the last line as part of the stanza. It’s haunting, it’s unyielding in its declaration, “I do not believe” repeated twice. Yet there is no bitterness to the tone. In fact, that’s one of the things that I appreciate about the writing in WATER is the lack of sentimentality, the subtle distance Sze-Lorrain maintains throughout, thereby granting the reader a chance to engage with each poem on its own terms.
Two paper pages later and I’ve only discussed one poem. Bear with me. It took me five days to read and reread 42 poems. No, I am not a slow reader, but a good book of poetry will make you stop, think, walk around it, stop, think, and drink more cups of hot tea in five days than you might all year long. The epigraph to the first section of the book, Biography of Hunger, cited at the beginning of this review, engaged my mind half the day; I could have married it by now. But I was intrigued. I wanted to know what these words:
At the tip of every tongue,
the wind, a chasm —
desire enters the forest.
…had to do with the biography of hunger. It almost reads like haiku, except it doesn’t conform to the traditional 5-7-5 rule. But here you have, “tongue, wind, chasm, desire and forest.” How are these words related? Or are they even related? They are and they aren’t. They’re all related to hunger but they’re not directly related to each other. Here is my reading of that epigraph: Hunger is something that is persistent but vague as the wind; wide as a chasm, or an abyss; something to be tasted, teased as on the tip of the tongue but never fully sated; and it is a desire that grows into a forest with all its overtones and mysteries. Onward, the book is divided up into three sections:
I: Biography of Hunger
II: Dear Paris,
III: The Key Always Opens
My favorite section was Biography of Hunger. Let’s categorize this as the proletariat section, or the people’s poetry. The poems that stood out for me were, “My Grandmother Waters the Moon,” “Par avion,” “A Course in Subtlety,” and “Fragile.” To choose one poem over another is indicative of the overweening taste of this reviewer, but I want to highlight Par avion for the fine reading between the lines:
When the envelope arrived with a shriveled
brown shroud, it confessed
a vulnerable hand, shaking and
afraid to write feelings.
His letter translated nothing but instructions,
Confucian wisdom (One must not sit
on a mat that is not straight), from
father to daughter, two cultures apart.
The real message was drowned
on the way, washed by tears
from the sky that blurred
address and date. I could not finish
reading everything because those words,
so measured, so judiciously rendered,
contained no plain voice
that could speak to me in an unflowered
language. Only silence —
ailing with loneliness, a palpitating
heart, sitting between
a window and a door, waiting for more
than a paper response.
I love the delicate balance between what’s said and not said, but one can gain the gamut of emotions running through so few lines: The hope and the yearning of a father to see his daughter. This poem is evocative, beautiful with longing.
I admit I was least enthused about Section II: Dear Paris, although a good portion of the book is dedicated to life in Paris. Truly what does one do in Paris except shop, visit museums and dine on some of the world’s finest cuisines – as if there were a problem with that? But no matter how long one has lived there, one will always feel like a tourist, even the natives are restless. That’s why this section didn’t endear me to it as the first and the last sections. I felt as if the poems were narrated from the perspective of a tourist and one must understand this is purely subjective on my part. To skip over this section is to miss out on some of the most sensual pleasures of poetry and this one essential poem, Platform 15, Gare du Nord:
As the stranger stepped forward to descend,
one foot out of the train, passengers
folded like spades, swampy in their spines,
radioactive towards one another. Ritardando,
hissful silence —
each equipped in full regalia
for arriving: feathered boas, furry gowns,
smoking jackets with velvet-trimmed cuffs.
How can he travel in the first-class cabin?[…elision]
Once the cane slid
an inch, his body split, landing to an aria of gasps.
A giant body mass flat on the platform. It convulsed,
as if it contained a thousand pushpins. I wished
he had fallen without consequence.Why did everyone pretend nothing had happened?
Without that smile, gold-molared, his face was an empty pot.
Picture embarrassment going to his bones
before it took root in onlookers’ hearts. Only white
rolling in his eyes, he found his dark glasseswith a fist pounding the air. Slurring words
warbled from his tongue, did he mumble I’m so sorry?
It’s a frightening poem. It’s an observation about cultural norms. It’s about embarrassment and the question you have ask yourself why is it one becomes so easily embarrassed when in pain? Why not howl, scream and swear out loud? Children never say, “I’m sorry I fell.” The poem is heart wrenching, and personally I would have ended on the part I quoted above. But the poem continues eleven more lines which I’ve not included.
In Section III: The Key Always Opens, you’ll meet artists, musicians, singers…from Edith Piaf to Chopin, from Dora Marr to Van Gogh…Some of the best poems are in this section. The poem that stood out most for me was, A Lot had Happened: A Five Act Play / After Gertrude Stein. It’s somewhat an experimental poem and at first I was completely turned off as I have never been a fan of Stein’s work, it annoys me. But after three successive reads, Sze-Lorrain’s poem grew on me. I like the recursive nature of the poem that reads like a koan:
We are listening to what he is saying because he is saying what we are listening to. Is he saying what he is listening to inside himself when we are not saying what is outside of us? We are not saying because we are listening, but is he saying because he is not listening?
And that concludes this review. Exuent omnes! My thanks to Fiona Sze-Lorrain for allowing me the self-indulgent pleasure of reviewing and analyzing WATER THE MOON. The book is an exquisite journey in the life of an artist/poet whose words compel us to explore the old world with new eyes.
______________________________________________________________________
About the Author: Fiona Sze-Lorrain was born in Singapore, and grew up in a hybrid of cultures. After receiving a British education, she moved to the States, and graduated from Columbia University and New York University before pursuing a Ph.D. at Paris IV-Sorbonne. A zheng concertist, she has performed worldwide. One of the editors at Cerise Press, she writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. She lives in both New York City and Paris, France.