‘M’ explores the evolving world of feminist critique, drawing on history, culture and patriarchy, putting the poet’s skills at dramatic scene-setting to good effect. ‘feminine reconciliation’ reads as a pithy riff on popular magazines and their penchant for advice columns: ;what a woman wants is shoes that go with every mood / what she needs is an attitude that can wear many hats.’ In ‘the bindi escape’, a living deity leaves ritual behind:
12 days of purifying in isolation she wipes the red sun belated dreams off her charcoal-rimmed eyes the spirit vacates the body light escaping between her remoistenable thighs two entities lie languidly in the corona of midnight innocence making bolts out of peepal with burgeoning tongues the bindi’s making a scandalous cross towards freedom
In ‘here comes the truth’ the rituals of a traditional upbringing are laid waste by sudden flight at the end of the Vietnam War, when the refrain of ‘White Christmas’ signalled the urgency to evacuate:
she was not privy to the monk’s staged self-immolation White Christmas and Bing Crosby’s common key the entire village fumbling in the red land
The poem concludes with an epiphany of arrival in the United States, where the speaker ‘got all the answers from the immaculate self-cleaning airport toilets / no P. M. of W. C. forcing a tip from her.’
‘my would be sister’ reflects on this flight, and the alternative histories it represents. Growing up as ‘an au fait young woman’, she sees her home country as a place where ‘female laborers’ [sic] take ‘routine / beatings from their husbands like cultural norms.’ However, ‘if the night-sea escape had failed’ she might be, at 15, ‘prime age for pre-arranged marriage, lying leisurely on the hammock in the coconut grove.’
Another particularly strong poem in the collection, ‘on the 7thfloor’ skillfully employs the trope of a movie shot to suggest dark emotions within a contained and eroticised space – the theatre of the room:
the ceiling fan’s blades decapitate the plump moon of the 7th floor flashes of light contaminate the eerie air absolute silence spirit possessed with an obvious sixth sense a woman plunging a needle through each fingernail sewing a secret lover’s name on the inside of her longing thighs without uttering a cry
Although issues of gender predominate in the second section of the collection, it is not an exclusive preoccupation. Among poems of a different timbre and subject, ‘the cloud hunter’ is a delightful, witty response to pareidoia, as the poem transforms from observations of cultural predilections: ‘the Vietnamese see a pixy dragon / the Chinese see a bad omen’, to being a somewhat rueful celebration of poetry:
I am proud of my trade regardless protecting the hangover of our fading faction there are so few of us left surviving barely on the illicitly traded puff of time and in order to avoid detection we now call ourselves poets
Overall, this lively and impressive collection showcases feminist humour shaping the sharp cut of the poetic line. It sees Lưu Diệu Vân extending her range, and presenting a number of compelling poems, which invite rewarding re-reading.
