Reviewed by Ken Weisner, U.C. Santa Cruz

[Ken Weisner teaches writing at U.C. Santa Cruz. He edits both Quarry West through Porter College at U.C.S.C., and Sifrut, the semi-annual literary supplement of The San Francisco based Jewish Bulletin.]

There are multiple exiles in this new poetry of Marilyn Chin's, but none so engrossing and fulfilling as their flights into form--their miraculous crossings into language. "Truly, there are higher vistas, better gazebos,/ miraculous avenues beyond these closed doors// ...on regret road we must not tarry," sings the narrator of "Exile's Letter" ("after the failed revolution"). Multiple exiles (political, cultural, familial, linguistic) haunt Chin's poems which in turn somehow shimmer with strong, often brilliant voicings.

This is not a poetry of longing, rather one of satiation and determination--less the groan of being under the thumb of empire, and more the insistence (the "barbaric yawp")--and the compassion--of Whitman: "Lover, on Tienanmen Square, near the Avenue of Eternal Peace/ ...Let me place my mouth over your mouth,/ let me breathe life into your life/ let me summon the paired connubial geese/ from the far reaches of the galaxy/ to soar over the red spokes of the sun's slow chariot/ and begin again" ("Beijing Spring").

In short, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, Chin's second book, is first rate poetry. (Her first book, Dwarf Bamboo , was nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in 1987.)

In each book, Chin has created new lyric forms, often hybrids of Chinese and English forms, as she has explored the full range of her voice--a voice which moves impressively from tenderness to searing irony. Interested in "cultivating the consummate political poem," Chin is at the same time a scholar and translator of Chinese literature, especially poetry (The Selected Poems of Ai Qing , Indiana University Press, 1985).

Divided into six titled sections, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty begins with a section called "Exile's Letter" which introduces Chin's essential alliegances and exiles as well as her incisive humour. In "How I Got that Name," subtitled "an essay on assimilation," Chin battles culture and gender displacement with what Adrienne Rich calls her "high mockery of wit": "Of course/ the name has been changed/ somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,/ when my father the paperson/ in the late 1950s/obsessed with a bombshell blond/ transliterated 'Mei Ling' to 'Marilyn'/ And nobody dared question/ his initial impulse--for we all know/lust drove men to greatness,/ not goodness, not decency./ And there I was, a wayward pink baby,/ named after some tragic white woman/ swollen with gin and Nembutal...." Patriarchy and assimilation are beasts; they kill in this book, increasing exponentially the magnitude of internalized oppression and interior exile. And yet Chin's is also a book of insistent survivals--now elegant, now acrobatic; in fact, it is a book loaded with love and amazement. "How I Got That Name" ends: "Like the jowls of a mighty whale,/ or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,/ it swallowed her whole./ She did not flinch or writhe, nor fret about the afterlife,/ but stayed! Solid as wood, happily/ a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized/ by all that was lavished upon her/ and all that was taken away!" Chin's poems are historicized (gnawed and tattered) as well as sung (mesmerized). Her arguments are arias. Her poems are of exile and assimilation--and their undoing.

In the second section, "The Tao and the Art of Leavetaking," Chin emphasizes themes of loss and elegy but also foregrounds experiments with hybrid forms, such as the one line stanzas of "Reggae Renga," the constant surprise and aphoristic leaps of "The Tao and the Art of Leavetaking" and "Sad Guitar," or the longish elegant lines of "Autumn Leaves" with its wry humour and touching compassion. Chin's elegies, as in "Altar" for a grandmother, or "Elegy for Chloe Nguyen" (a brilliant friend who died in her thirties) or "Leaving San Francisco" written for "Master Weldon Kees"--work through both loss and identity politics in gorgeous lyric forms.

"Barbarian Suite," first published in The Open Boat, the anthology of Asian American writing edited by Garret Hongo in 1992, is paced and shaped in the style of one of Tu Fu's "Meditations" and yet revoiced as an innovative American form. Dedicated to Chin's friend the fiction writer David Wong Louie (Pangs of Love, Knopf, 1992), "Barbarian Suite" mixes voices with daring: "Orchids doth not bloom, baby, they cry, they explode./ Meanwhile our anger gets muted in their fatal beauty--/AmerAsia so harmonious under a canopy of stars/ The pram of the new nation, the wind rocks it gently./ Truth has no face, we make it wear ours...." By unmasking truth and taking the muzzle off, Chin's polyglossia propels proverb as well as plot--this is Basho, Tu Fu and Chuang-tzu as well as Don Justice, Cavafy and Bob Marley ("Reggae Renga") and Chinese erotic novels. This is a reconstituting of the American lexicon, and these are fresh, exciting infusions of form for any of us who love the lyric.

Most of Chin's poems (including the title poem) act as conduits to voices of the silenced, including silenced and vanished women of Chinese antiquity, as well as mothers and grandmothers, revolutionaries of Tienanmen, assimilated selves, and some of our recent fallen--like the eight poems of the book's center section, "Homage to Diana Toy," a chilling portrayal of the life (and death) of a psychiatric in-patient. Chin's ear is tuned to high tragedy.

Written with great tenderness, these eight poems are wrenching because "these hands are so small, Diana,/ they can fix only what is before them./ The mosaic is difficult to piece...." Compassion cannot undo what has been done. This has been a life of terrifying traps and abuses, both in and outside the hospital. Chin's understanding cycles to sudden upsurgings of rage, which astonish: "...do not mourn her./ You never shed a tear into her tin cup of living./ Tears would be spit now on the grave of the dead." Chin turns the tables in these moments of operatic revenge.

In the book's fifth section, "Love Poesy," the poems are again compellingly tender while exploring what Chin herself refers to as love's "postcolonial subtext." "His Parents' Baggage," much like a Sharon Olds' poem, maps the colonized landscape of a lover's psyche, "and in the depth of night/ and in the wake of our dreams,/ I reach out my arms to embrace what is left." The wonderful "Composed Near the Bay Bridge" (after a wild party) opens with a psychocultural tango: "Amerigo has a finger on the pulse of China./ He, Amerigo, is dressed profoundly punk:/ Mohawk-pate, spiked dog collar, black leather thighs./ She, China, freshly hennaed and boaed, is intrigued/ with the new diaspora and the sexual freedom...." "Love Poesy" concludes with "Summer Love" in which "black smoke rising means that I am cooking/ dried lotus, bay oysters scrambled with eggs..." and "I let you touch me where I am most vulnerable,/ heart of the vulva, vulva of the heart...//...let the summers be savored and the centuries forgiven." In Chin's work, the centuries may be forgiven, but never forgotten.

"In "Old Asian Hand," the speaker ends the poem asking: "Old Asian Hand,/ below the blue equator, have you discovered/ the warm, moist lichen/ of early autumn?// Beneath the marl of the new diaspora,/ clear water runs." "Marl" as a verb means to lash or bind, but as a noun it is a crumbly mixture of clay, sand and limestone--a fertilizer. Chin's diction is wrought with the duplicity and tension of loving in a place and time when, as she puts it, to "assimilate into America means to annihilate one's culture, language, religion, and to be usurped by a culture that is monolingual, monotheistic, and whose world view is tied to the viscissitudes of commerce."

Chin's love poems, like all the poems here, are carefully wrought as both politics and diction, full of lexical rewards. When "clear water runs" at the end of "Old Asian Hand," the spirituality and eros of that image will remind readers of the water of "Clear White Stream" where nightmares are held in tableaux; and it will also suggest the "anger so clear--I can see the hairs on the caterpillar and the wind on the hairs" of the "Reggae Renga." The full implication of clarity in Chin's work emphasizes irony, anger, and bitter-sharp perception--a freedom to be both "fierce and tender" (the book's final words).

In that final section, "Beijing Spring: for the Chinese Democratic Movement," Chin continues to politicize her purposes in relation to her most personal themes. "The Floral Apron" is an accomplished closed-form lyric homage to Chin's mother and her mother's mothers--women of both a literal and a mythical past--all composed to the crack and squirt of squid on the chopping block: "And although we have traveled far/ we would never forget that primal lesson/ --on patience, courage, forebearance,/ on how to love squid despite squid,/ how to honor the village, the tribe,/ that floral apron." Political homage to the Chinese democratic movement is interlaced with portraits of cousins and mothers and self, as in "Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990-1991." Here again a woman from Chinese antiquity merges into a contemporary landscape, this time one that includes the Persian Gulf War. "Lover, destroyer, saviour" the speaker cries out as she confronts her own complicity. "I shall admit it,/ There was no colonialist coersion;/ sadly, we blended together well." But in its anger, homages, ironies and ecstacies, Chin's book is determined resistance.

In the introduction to the anthology Dissident Song, A Contemporary Asian American Anthology, a special issue ofQuarry West which Chin co-edited in 1991 with David Wong Louie, Chin writes that "it is our duty to usurp the canon from its monolithic, monocultural, and henceforth monotonous fate. It is up to 'ethnic' writers to save American literature from becoming suburban 'white noise'." This is precisely the success of Chin's collection; we are mesmerized and enriched by such dutiful usurpations.