Tag Archives: Eileen Chong

Eileen Chong, Peony (Pitt Street Poetry 2014)

This is Eileen Chong’s second book of poetry. It’s bigger and more varied than her first, Burning Rice, but is just as lucid, friendly, and resonant.

Between reading it and writing this blog post, I made the mistake of reading comments by other poets on Eileen Chong’s page at Pitt Street Poetry. It was a mistake because, well, what can I say here beyond ‘Go and read what they said’ and then ‘Go and read the poems’?

This is from Rhyll McMaster (the phrases in quotes are, obviously, from the poems):

Displacement, attachment, sweat, warmth and food, communion, aloneness, disquiet and longing – these poems coax shadows out of dark recesses, ‘layered like memory, like grief.’ Their strength lies not in their settings but in their familiarity with the human spirit, ‘at our true selves, so far, yet so close to home’.

Then I read Kim Cheng Boey’s review in Mascara of Chong’s first book, Burning Rice:

The poems here are informed by what James Clifford calls ‘the empowering paradox of diaspora’, which is ‘that dwelling here assumes solidarity and connection there.’ They ride the creative tension between countries, cultures and languages. …

At the heart of Burning Rice are delicately and meticulously crafted meditations on the complex web of attachments, loss and longing, so rich with imagery and narrative that they transcend the poet’s own ethnic, cultural and regional background.

So yes, what they said, it’s still true of this book – diaspora, familiarity, meticulousness, complex web of attachments – though they don’t mention the pleasure these poems bring to the reader.

Eileen Chong came to Australia from her native Singapore in 2007, and her poems are shot through with the experience of migration, with a sense of displacement. To use Kim Cheng Boey/James Clifford’s terms, some look back to there; some burrow into the intimacy of here; others go elsewhere (it’s interesting, the way traveller’s tales, traveller’s poems, have a different weight when written by someone with a history of migration).

The book is divided into four untitled sections. The first deals largely with grandparents, parents and childhood memories. The second, which includes most of the travel poems, is largely addressed to a spouse – and who could resist the comic vision of terror and intimacy in ‘Mid-Air Disaster’? The third section turns to other friends and family, celebrating births and birthdays, reminiscing, cooking together. (Food and cooking loom large all through the book.)

The fourth section is a miscellany – ekphrasis (a word my iPad’s autocorrect doesn’t like, and nor do I much, a hi-falutin way of saying poetry about artworks), history, dreams, Sydney scenes and more. This section sent me off to read Adrienne Rich’s fabulous ‘Love Poems’ and to rediscover Robert Wiles’s famous photograph of Evelyn McHale taken just after she suicided by jumping off the Empire State Building. The book ends with the title poem, whose last lines may be the only place where the notion of diasporic identity is raised in the abstract, only to be challenged, with characteristic equanimity:

——————One lady nods and smiles:
China’s national flower. Is it? Am I? I’ve forgotten.

Here’s a video of Eileen (pronounced Ee-leen, by the way) reading three of her poems.

Peony is the fifth book I’ve read as part of the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge. Pitt Street Poetry sent me a complimentary copy with a personal – and accurate – note saying it was for my reading pleasure.

Eileen Chong, Burning Rice (Australian Poetry 2012, Pitt Street Poetry 2013)

This pocket-sized volume was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards along with giants John Kinsella, Peter Rose and Jennifer Maiden. I approve.

I’ve recently read a bunch of scholarly essays about multiculturalism, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, transnationalism, diasporic writing and other ways of creating or perceiving poetry that is not contained within a single cultural tradition. In that context, I guess these poems by Eileen Chong would be classed as diasporic: most of them deal one way or another with her Singaporean heritage and her separation from it.

But as it happens, I’ve also been rereading (with a heavy heart) some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and it strikes me that Chong’s poems about her parents and grandparents, the family’s food traditions, her childhood memories of Singapore streets, even Chinese history and classic Chinese poets, are part of a similar project to Heaney’s when he writes about his parents and forebears, his childhood memories of Irish fields, his tales of Irish saints and scholars. It would be as big a mistake to fence off this poetry in some semi-ethnographic corral as to do that with Heaney’s. Surely everyone can respond at a deeply human level to poetry in which a mind engages with the relationship between the present world and the world of childhood and heritage?

At least that’s my experience. Take the first poem, which also gives the book its title. It begins:

I did not mean to burn the rice tonight.
'Planting rice is never fun' – generations
of men, women and children ankle-deep
in padi fields, bent double at the waist,
immersing seedlings day after day.

then goes on to evoke the other kinds of work involved in growing and harvesting rice, before coming back at last to the burnt rice with a killer final line (you can read the poem here). At a personal level, this poem works wonderfully for me. It hooks my emotions by stirring into awareness something of my own very different heritage: four generations of my family – great-grandfather, grandfather, father and brother – have been sugar farmers. Substitute marmalade for rice, and there I am in my inner suburban kitchen, trying to get the quantity of sugar right, enough to make the marmalade set but not too sweet, and lurking not so very far in the background the memory of cane paddocks, cane fires, cane knives and all they meant in my childhood. My personal story is very different from Chong’s and the history of sugar in North Queensland has little in common with that of rice in east Asia, but that’s where the poem touches me, brings part of my mind alive.

I don’t know that that says much about the actual poetry. There are other deceptively straightforward poems about Asian food and about Chong’s parents and grandparents, some striking dramatic monologues spoken by women from east Asian history, including a number connected to Lu Xun (considered by many, according to Wikipedia, to be the leading figure of modern Chinese literature), some sweet encounters with other Australian poets. I’m looking forward to more.

This seems to be the tenth book I’ve read as part of the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge.