St Lucia: University of Queensland Press: 2025, 114pp.
In one of those games where very long books are compressed into the shortest possible form, someone once said that all of the complex reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, analysed at length in Gibbon’s great work, could be summed up as “bishops and barbarians”. In a similar way, it’s hard not to think of the essence of Eileen Chong’s substantial output as “Food and Forebears” – with the possible alliterative addition of “flowers”. Choosing “forebears” rather than “family” is important because the obsession in Chong’s poetry is not with children and in-laws but rather with ancestors. It’s fitting that one of the most profound of her laments for her medically-caused childlessness is “what does it mean for a life / when you know you will be no-one’s ancestor?”. One of the features of alliterative pairs is the odd way the two nouns have of infecting each other. Bishops and Barbarians may seem an opposed pair but you only have to think of the psychotic behaviour of the Arian and Catholic bishops of the fourth century to see the connection. In a similar way a physical experience like eating and an emotional one like respecting one’s grandparents and parents have, in Chong’s poetry, a much more intense connection than might first appear. It was said of John Blight’s poetry, “His best poems are about the sea” and it might similarly be said of Chong’s, “Her best poems are about food”. But trying to pinpoint the cornerstones of anyone’s poetry in this way, though it is an important critical process does, as I’ve noted elsewhere, have a slight tendency to homogenise. This new book, made up of 101 short, sometimes curtailed pieces, is a reminder that underneath the image of Chong as one of those newer poets who have made available to mainstream Australians the different and fascinating worldview of those born in south-east Asia, there is also a poet interested in developing ways of writing, of approaching her own experiences, that are beyond simple lyrical explorations, even though her reputation probably rests on such poems.
It’s worthwhile noting in passing, for example, that although her first book, Burning Rice, is largely composed of poems about food and forebears, it does have six dramatic monologues and begins (first poems in first books are especially important) with what I read as a surreal poem about falling in love. So We Speak of Flowers is a book that requires that we look at it as a continuation of a desire to experiment in new ways of martialling core material. An Author’s Note helps readers orient themselves. It describes the poems as being each a “meditation on mourning” and the book’s structure as being built on the Buddhist notion that grieving ends on the hundredth day when the soul is reborn. It also says that the poems can be read in any order and that “the shifting juxtapositions will give rise to innumerable permutations”. Part of the book’s success as a new approach to familiar material will depend on how successful it is at this level and I have to say that I read this note as something of a challenge. I’ve since reread the book in reverse order as well as ordered alphabetically by the first word of each poem. I’ve even tried to reorder the book along the principles of a Persian diwan, that is alphabetically by the last stressed syllable of the first line – a pleasantly athematic approach that one would like to see used more often as a structuring device, though it comes to grief on prose-poems. I couldn’t detect, as a result, that it was a strongly different book each time. But the experiment did make clear how many mini-sequences there are within its structure. When these sequences were broken up, the result was very jarring, at least superficially, but it often produced some unexpected connections.
Take, for example, the groups of poems 37 to 41 and 48 to 55. The first are extended prose pieces and the second are each made up of two three-line stanzas. In other words, they are groupings (as are 92 to 96) which are suggested by formal similarities. Poems 37 to 41 are quite distinctive: they perhaps try to capture poetic life – writing, reading, making art – by using a stream of consciousness technique. If you break this sequence up by organising the poems alphabetically, you can get some interesting effects. The first poem, 37, begins:
I am six years old / I was born in November / I am in the last class / My form teacher is Mrs Aw / I write with a pencil / I do not know how to spell orange / how do you say zebra crossing in Mandarin . . . . . it is true I am impatient with prose / there are many rules that poetry can circumvent / I cannot pretend to understand or make sense of everything that happens to me / anything can happen in a poem like in a dream / but some poems are nightmares / especially the rhyming ones . . .
If this is read between poems 70 (“Grit enters an oyster . . .”) and 91 (“I am tired of running . . .) as an alphabetic structuring requires, there isn’t a surprising change from verse to prose since 70 and 91 are written as prose poems. And actually they make for interesting thematic resonances since 70 is about the way art is built out of pain (analogous to the oyster’s pearl) and 91, too, begins with a childhood memory.
Poems 48 to 55 are the kind of brief, allusive pieces that a collection such as this encourages. To appear in a conventional collection they would probably have to be strung together with some kind of all-encompassing title like “Eight Views of . . . “. Some of them – 49, for example – really need context:
From the fourth-storey window, a girl watches her brother emerge from within the block of flats and make his way uphill along the path, jangling a pocketful of coins. The trees obscure her view, and he is gone.
It’s not clear whether or not this is autobiographical, but it is tempting to read it as a poem of a certain kind of loss, either the loss of the brother or a lament that a young boy has freedoms that the girl does not have. The later poems in this group are definitely about loss. In 52 a woman leaves and in 53 it is the man. 54 recalls a visit to a dying relative (“Difficult to believe she once danced / and sang . . .”) and 55 might be some kind of summary of the seven preceding poems:
Each night we slough off our old selves in our sleep. I dream of buses, of untethered balloons. Every night I try to stay intact. The bed is a grave; the sheets, a shroud. In the morning you raise the blinds, and I wake. I remember all things. I understand nothing.
If the whole book is read alphabetically, this last of the group appears between poems 14 and 92. Poem 14 is a meditation on the death of a grandparent (“Jade rounds slipped / from shrunken wrists”) and the poet’s own, future death (“It will be my turn to embark on // the silent, unknown journey”) but it does finish with a daybreak that recalls the end of 55. 92 is a brief piece:
Every step we took echoed in the hills. Clouds dispersed by gusts of north wind. Beyond the ridge, mists descended over the old poet’s dreams of rice wine, of moonlight.
Presumably the “old poet” here is Li Bai, or someone similar, but there is a stimulating resonance in the way that a poem about sleep and dreams should be read alongside a poem such as this which thinks about an earlier poet’s dreams.
The reason these re-orderings always seem to retain some kind of coherence is that the book’s overarching concern is grief for loss. This prompts the questions: What kind of griefs and what kind of losses. The death of grandparents is an obvious one made distinctive by Chong’s connection of the loss with food as in 75:
I cradled the legs of a raw chicken in my hands and thought: this is dead flesh. It was my grandfather who ate the first meal I ever prepared. He died that same year. The morning after my grandmother passed on, my mother asked for rice porridge. It is palatable comfort; we are bereft and crippled. On screen, my grandmother’s eyes were dulled. My voice rang out in the room: empty echoes.
One of the elements that highlights the loss of grandparents is that her family were continuously in a state of migration, moving from northern China to the south and thence to Singapore and Australia. Where there is no continuity of place, continuity of family must become especially important. But loss of place, combined with loss of language is an important cause of grief here. Emphasising this is a feeling that poetry – an expression of language – can only fall short. A short poem, 5, speculates on what might have happened had the ancestors arrived in Australia with the first waves of migrations
If an ancestor had continued south, what then? A market garden, goldfields, a laundry, the family restaurant? Not this bloodless mining of words, this stymied pen.
One of the most conventional poems in the book – and hence least satisfying – is 6 which contains a response to the predictable enough request: “Write for your people”. But, as the poem goes on to point out, these were a people:
. . . . .
who lost their language.
Who carved out new worlds.
Grandfathers of grandfathers:
illegible words in a ledger.
The order of misspelled names
written wrongly on all the forms.
I call these names in the night.
My people, I cry. My people –
There is no answer.
They are long cold in the earth.
They are far beyond communion.
One of the things that the more experimental cast of many of the poems in this book does is provide a context for a conventional poem such as this, so that it is protected from the charge of being maudlin which it might attract if it appeared on its own, in a newspaper or journal, say. The same can be said of the hundredth poem which makes its point simply and clearly:
At night I wander our shophouse, long since demolished. It exists only in dream country. I burn my offerings. All turns to ash. Can spirits find their descendants lost in foreign countries? How do you put down roots in stolen country? I thirst. The earth is salt. I am alone in every country.
There are also poems where the loss refers to a broken relationship. Poem 60 is a good, imagistic, example:
The roast in the oven grown cold The empty bed Her hair on your coat No letters for weeks Rain all day The garden near drowned The lost cat Its collar worn through
And a prose poem, 47, provides a glimpse of a much more assertive woman who began with the wrong idea of what marriage is and might do:
It was like this: I thought I was in love. I said to myself: This is what love is. I saw it happen to others. I did not think happiness was compatible with my reality. I understood only the characters for doorway, table, and bed. I thought marriage was an envelope into which I could seal the secret poetry of myself. I left it dormant in a drawer until one day, when I found a dull knife. I honed its edge on the underside of a china bowl, the way my grandmother had taught me.
Even here, in a poem of analysis, an ancestor is important as is the domestic image of the place where food gets prepared.
So, ultimately, We Speak of Flowers is a book about loss and grief. So powerful is this theme that a poem like 86
The ceiling slopes upwards, and back down again. A globe, round and white as the moon, is suspended overhead. Four faceless musicians are on stage; another is hidden behind the gleaming piano. Lamplight and shadows. Glasses clink, and voices murmur. The room is warm and smoky. Time is of no consequence here. Off-canvas, a barman polishes a wooden counter, over and over. Someone leaves the club; the door swings open and shut, shut and open.
almost demands that it be read as a portrait of a club where grief-stricken, lonely souls go to drown their sorrows whereas in another context it might be a place of warm sociability. I spoke before of grief and loss as a theme but that isn’t really the correct word. After all any group of disparate poems can be collected and unified by the claim that the overarching theme is something like “Life” or “Love”. In We Speak of Flowers, grief is an obsession and no matter the form or approach of individual pieces, it forces its way into expression.
