Mostly, this approach is startlingly effective, although it did sometimes leaves this reader feeling like an eavesdropper on some conversation not quite fully understood. However this is not necessarily a criticism, as such ambiguity allows the poems to 'unfold' on subsequent readings, and also allows the reader room to engage imaginatively with the work and to impose their own interpretations on it.
Evocative descriptions of marshes and mountains give way to stories of individuals: a falconer, travellers, riders and embroiderers, each of whom interpret life in the light of their own individual actions. Striking descriptions abound: ('Birds have moved into my arms / and are flourishing' - "Falconer's Dawn"; 'He turned and there were eyes in the sage / and juniper' - "The Rider"; 'The sea has made a mouth of itself, like a huge man capable of the most delicate phrases' - "Bounty"; '... the moon wishes to dissipate, / and earth groans under its weight of mice, / and God has given us everything, / everything' - "Sinking Song"). Lew's characters speak from their inner worlds, giving the impression of thoughts, rather than words, being communicated in an intimate, and highly visual, way.
One of Lew's strengths is her ability to enter into the minds of her characters. Thus, we encounter the voices of an unnamed crew member of the famous 'Bounty' ("Bounty"), and of committed Communists looking back on times of revolution and war ("Red"). In "Pocket Constellations" we hear the voice of a soldier of resistance, and within his voice, his justification for killing:
'I am avenging, but at night
I tunnel, burying more mines in the soft soil
of the pass.
All our lives we have hated white moonlight.
All our lives we have been hating ...'
With 'hearts full of vicious light', Lew's soldiers scarred by war can do nothing but perpetuate the carnage.
"Praise Report" examines faith, confession, prayer and sin; in "Cornfield School" a supporter of lynchings and burnings in the Mississippi Delta expresses his hatred of 'uppitty' blacks; and in "My Illusion of the Tycoon", a photographer speaks of an 'elaborately courteous' lover whom she tries to capture on emulsion: 'Dangerousness of the man, it is quite beautiful / ... / What haunts is the absence the eye collects'. A murderer describes his own lack of remorse at the death he considers a 'beginning' and 'beautiful'("Prey"). These pieces are quite powerful in their unexpectedness.
Some others, however, seem to hide behind their cleverness, and it becomes difficult to glean (more than vaguely) what the author intends to tell us. "Fugue of the Deal", "The End of Debonair", "Rice", "Man coming back as a Bird", and "Fine Weather of the Seige" - though all filled with 'poetic' descriptions - all fall into this category, making reading them a frustrating and unrewarding exercise. The title poem, and the one following ("Pali") play with repeating lines, some of which are quite striking in their imagery ('I found these beautiful machines abandoned here'; 'Flourish the little flower in the lemon-coloured hands') but the overall meaning of the poems remains, to this reader, a mystery. There's no doubt that Emma Lew is an original and innovative poet; I only wish she'd ditch the habitual ambiguity and communicate more openly what she really means to say.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2006)
