This kind of worldliness – or even immanence – is not unusual in Anglophone poetry, but Hong Ying has her own particularity. Her world is not always relationally harmonious either: ‘A pigeon charges at the car window/Angrily protesting/And shouting into his ear’ (‘House with a Dome Roof’); ‘The ant in the grass laughs icily … That wretched ant/Is twitching nonstop’ (‘Dice’). How humorous this is supposed to be I’m not sure; nor of the following:
It’s a girl sitting on a chair watching
Moths five of them
Are flying outside the window
I’m a woman and I have a big mirror
(‘Trap of Mirrors’)
While many of Hong Ying’s titles are perfunctory, consisting of one word, others show us something extra of her (perhaps supported by Lee’s) imaginative and conceptual sensibility: ‘Several Hundred Miles of Emotion’, ‘Swallow-Style Exercise on a Mat’ and ‘The Day Madrid Turned into a Water City’. Yet despite Hong Ying’s distinction we can also read her work in relation to a number of Australian poets. ‘The Elm is Already in Flower’ may recall the deceptive simplicity of Ania Walwicz. But there are stronger similarities to the poetry of Hong Ying’s local contemporaries, Claire Gaskin and Emma Lew.
‘Destruction’, above, is not unlike the poetry of Gaskin, which exploits the surreal effects of juxtaposition as well as the affectiveness of condensation. Gaskin relies more on the long line than Hong Ying, yet we can read both the latter’s long and broken lines as having a resemblance to Gaskin’s cadenced summaries: the title ‘Love Walked Out the Door into the Rain’; the phrase, ‘The bird’s tears try to move an immovable person’ (‘Books and Bird’); and, from ‘Fish Teaching Fish To Sing’, ‘You flee/ You are a fish/ With a broken spine’.
Some interesting poems (from 1992-1995) towards the end of the book deploy their titles and lines in an allegorical-seeming fashion that is reminiscent of Lew. These lines: ‘Blowing perfect smoke rings the white clothes he wears/Make his face look like a piece of anaemic rock’, from ‘Final Episode’ perhaps, but there are even stronger contenders. ‘Toy’ begins:
It’s a meeting you’ll use two plates and two cups A bottle of potent liquor also there’ll be a deep pit Fall in and you’ll make bubbles
The mordancy and the slight, prosy stretching of the line correspond. The poem continues:
Figurative images are handier than bundles of light For carving the width of a house’s shadow
Such lines give the impression of being taken from a great hoard of versatile twigs, or strips, of language: a greater language that is not limited to English, and is perhaps beyond alphabetical and oral/script distinctions. They seem to me worldly, mobile lines, the effect of hundreds of years of reading in translation. There are no gendered references in the first two stanzas of ‘Toy’ (or the fifth and final), but in the third and fourth the figure of a woman appears:
A woman you all know at the conclusion is sitting alone Suddenly she requests a new topic It’s as if all the time she’d been hungry for terror […] If this woman could fly away She wouldn’t think that blossoming flowers could explode
There is enough semantic evidence to suggest that the poem is about a woman wanting to escape from a situation, yet given the context of Hong Ying’s oeuvre it could further be read as describing the pressure any being might be under, or as an allegory for pressure generally. The poem ends: ‘a burst of wild footsteps/ Arrives just at the right time’. The final poem of the section ‘Crows and History’ again has a folk feel. There are no explicit references to crows in the poem – nor to history – it rather tells of an ‘ear injured in a fall’, an ‘ear sprouting green hairs in the sunlight’. In an original extension of surrealism, it is as if the ear itself is having a nightmare: ‘tunes buried in flesh and bones rise in profusion … Only an obese ear is left shouting’. This is not quite the end of the book – there is one line and one section to go – but as a parodic image of global translation turned obscenely (therapeutically?) on itself, I wish it was.
