By Cyril Wong

Delicate Access
Madeleine Marie Slavick
Sixth Finger Press (2004) / 154 pages / HKD 88

In this new and meaty collection by Madeleine Marie Slavick, there is no shortage of fleeting insights to be unearthed like tiny gems from under the imagistically-rich topsoil of her lines. Each poem angles a restless torch at a dense, metaphorical landscape where nature and the city frequently meet, locating unremembered intimacies and failures of understanding between people, exposing the shadows of our internal negotiations in shaping a sense of cultural and existential relevance, and even casting fresh light upon the meanings of colours.

This collection is divided into seven sections: “hum, city, hum”, “Permanent Resident”, “love, unlove”, “Placing Asia”, “Nature”, “colo(u)r” and “things”. In the first section, the city is put under the poet’s sympathetic microscope, which hones in to “rat feet slid(ing) along to their next darkness like a wet shadow” (“city automatic”), or the “dust on a construction man’s surrendered / shoulders” (“subway searching”). This is a poetry of affectionate detail and the jagged arrangement of the line-fragments illuminates points of description by letting them jump out at the reader. The poems are filled with images that are often gracefully lightweight in their revelatory impressions, though some images end up merely sounding clever. And some lines do not always work, such as “I want... to send / send air chasing / until we move / with the current of the earth” – a slightly trite and clichéd ending for a poem (“everywhere air conditioner”).

The poems in “Permanent Resident” work better, possessing a restrained emotional urgency that render them more palpable on the page than the poems that came before. Indeed, it feels as if the personality of the speaker in the poems comes through with greater compassion and sensitivity from this point onwards in the book. In the poem, “Passage”, a piece that dangerously recalls the cultural exoticisation of such novels by Amy Tan and our very own Catherine Lim, redemption comes in the sympathy with which the details are rendered, such as “Gwaipo daughter-in-law is awake on the sofa bed / Do you see her? / Is she protected?” Short pieces like the different sections of “Repatriate” are funny and moving at the same time (“Go / home, Chink, go. / The snow stopped falling.”) “Doors” is a particularly brilliant poem, in which the transience of life is reflected anew through the description of a dead moth to much more: “Thin fur and bone draw an empty cat. / Close the door – the wind can blow your pet away.” The title “Permanent Resident” is ironically placed here, with its sense of officialdom and certainty undermined by so much evoked about transitions, being protected, and how, in a resonantly metaphorical and existential sense, one never sees “who is driving me home” (“taking this big ferry”).

“love, unlove” is a section that lovers of love poetry will enjoy for its sensuousness and the poet’s skillfully poignant eye. The poem, “Looking”, is spectacular in the quiet way locality is evoked to emphasise the social embarrassment an interracial relationship faces: “entire eyes come / from tiger balm pajama / men and women in metal / history elevators which have never / carried a Chinese man with a white woman”. The poet has says much with just a few line breaks, “women...give body-looks at him / her / then her again / and make a sum of it”. Evocative, sensual, emotionally restrained and precise in detail, many of the poems in this section, such as “island” and “Found”, are also full of tenderness: “village lights / small hands holding cup moments” (”island”); “Time smoothes / Like your hands might” (”Found”).

In the sections, “Placing Asia”, “To Nature” and “colo(u)r”, the poems turn even more Impressionistic, sometimes surreal, but always suggestive of something other than itself. This poem from “Placing Asia”, “The Pearl River”, contains such lines as “the City will shine green neon onto promenade trees in case the leaves also faint”; “cycle” has this as an ending, “sugarcane stalks cut / the arms and legs of too many countries / still warm with slave blood”. “To Nature”, as a section, has the shortest poems. Fleeting, slightly-less-than-haiku gestures that leave the reader thirsty for more, and justifiably so; for example, “Fog. Wet / breath” or “Snow. Skin of / clouds”. The section, “colo(u)r”, takes the method of evocative abstraction to a less convincing extreme. Lines do not add to much. “Blue is everything we cannot touch / Two eyes of open sea / Porcelain sky / A halo” from the poem, “Seeing blue”, merely reads well, and stirs the imagination. However, an excess of abstraction leaves the reader nothing to focus on, and such lines leave little impression on the mind once the poem is over.

The final section, “things”, a series of poems reminiscent of stream-of-consciousness writing, seems to mix everything the poet has done before in this collection into every single poem. Humour is also never too far away, despite the intellectual suggestiveness disguised beneath a seemingly casual description, such as in this line from one of the pieces in this section, “The cat enters a room, counting the amount of jump to reach all the surface while a dog smells and remembers and smells and remembers...” Nature, animals, the human body and, naturally, love, are themes that recur with a breathless rhythmic and luminously imagistic flow that leave a rich aftertaste in the imagination long after each poem is over. All untitled prose poems, the opening to this section is a piece that is probably the most glorious love poem in the collection. Savour this: “We will never know our arteries as arteries, but warmth always knows our blood, says her Chinese lover; please don’t shock the body with the temperature of ice, please swim, swim, let the arms and legs trail from the core of us.” Brave, honest, loving, even sometimes fiercely so, yet never leaving poetry’s more abstract, philosophical plane, the shifts from atmospheric, poetic airiness to frank, intimate details are unforgettable. This section is a more than a fitting way to end the collection, and this reviewer wonders if, perhaps, these prose pieces would one day grow in number and become enough to fill another powerful poetry collection.

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