The book consists of 119 pages of poems which are mostly shorter than a page and, almost without exception, pack a desolate punch:
he who walks in heaven leaves no traces
the moon never smiles, so near, yet so far
the nights are filled with the new-born baby's cry for help, low
murmurs, silences
have i ever lived?
have i?
where is the proof? ("Tonight is my Birthnight")
Not all of the poems are sad though. Some are actually funny in a wry kind of way, such as Yu's description of the seasons, where Autumn is a woman giving birth:
Autumn
Its vagina open
Lets out
A ripe golden sun ("The Four Seasons")
And there are scenes of tenderness, such as a father and son imitating birds together in "Three Scenes in a Melbourne Winter", or the delicate love poem which gives its words to the title:
"at a wild moment in my fantasy
i bought you
and stripped you of your night skin
and searched for the footnote
to my soul
in your rain-coloured eyes ("The Oriental Girl in William Street")
Mostly though, this collection explores the sensation of being an exile, and not just the kind of exile that comes with leaving your home country never to return, although that is certainly to be found here. There is also a more icy kind of exile - the notion of loss and disjointedness from self. China is, in many poems, the place to which the poet can never go back. In "Second Drifting" he dies twice: the first time he leaves his homeland, and when he tries to return, leaving Australia, the adopted homeland. In this poem, the loss of country becomes a loss of life, a loss of heart, a loss of self:
i used to have two hearts
One east and the other west
But I have nothing left now
Only this instinct to wander again.
The longing for a home which no longer exists in a recognisable form becomes the longing for a dream already passed. This kind of alienation is also manifest in some of the poems which explore aging and the loss of illusion and joy:
i often wonder what I should do
when sex no longer matters
when money no longer matters
when nothing really matters
that is valued in human life ("Night Thoughts (2 poems)")
Through the delicate brushstrokes of his words, Yu's voice dissolves into the air, the sky, the night, the mountains, the rain, and becomes distilled to a kind of intense nothingness - the atoms which we all must ultimately dissolve into. He presents the reader with things of beauty - memory, dawn, a pretty face, a lovely scene, or a delicious meal, but there is always a flip side. The fish he eats in the sunshine was once a fish that used to swim in the same sunshine - it is now dead ("On a Sunny Noon"). There are people making love on television, but it is only an illusion of happiness. They can be turned off at any moment ("Saturday Night").
Even at its most normal, we are dying always ("Solitude"). The beautiful dreams of youth are gone ("The Dream") and home is the place we can never return to. But Yu's poetry, even at its most desolate, is lightly shaped and often stunning in the delicate power of its impact. He writes in a whisper but the words resonate loudly, leaving the reader feeling the solitude while grinning knowingly at the appropriate and highly original metaphor.
(Reviewed by Magdalena Ball, September 2004)
