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Enter the Chrysanthemum
by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Halfmoon Bay, BC:
Caitlin Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-894759-32-8, 88 pp., $16.95 paper.
To enter Vancouver poet Fiona Lam's book, Enter the Chrysanthemum, is to enter a world of words that are fresh and lean. In the opening piece, the poet remembers her mother by recalling the deft lines she once imparted with her calligrapher's brush. In the poem, the reader sees a sketch of the delicate title flower emerge, stroke by simple brushstroke. But we also see so much in the way this mother-daughter relationship is defined:If only I had been paper,
a delicate, upturned face stroked
with such precise tenderness. [10]The piece sets the tone for the rest of the poems, all of which are achieved with a lean economy of words.
The collection is broken into four sections, each titled only with a number and an appropriate epigraph. They represent a progression from childhood memories with family to the experience of being a single mother with a son. As the narrator watches her child grow from infancy to boyhood, she witnesses her mother's decline from a busy physician's life to becoming a woman who doesn't recognize the people around her.
To call the book's structure yin and yang might seem simplistic, but there's a great deal of balance (and unbalance) in these poems, especially in the second part when the narrator writes about her own loves and romantic losses.
We steadied each other
as if we'd just arisen from disbelief
after a year of reeling through desire's tectonics. [28]Further, this is a section about babies--the realities of colic, engorged breasts. But it is also a time for understanding, as she recalls her mother and grandmothers--how they were "generations of unmothered women / bereaved, laden with family, raging" [34]. Seeing all those family faces imposed on her son's helps her find a kind of closure,
. . . forgiving
my mother the small crimes I'd tallied against her,
childhood trails of blood wiped clear. [34]The third section sees the child coming into his own. Many of the poems are riffs on legends and fairy tales, just the sort of stories a mother might tell her kindergarten son. Yet at the same time that the narrator shares the world with him, she does her best to protect him from it.
My son turns on the television,
wanting cartoons. Too late,
I sprint for the remote.
Scenes flash of bloody bundles--remains
of women, children . . . [61]She offers explanations, tries to answer his questions truthfully, but is torn by the knowledge that she can't always be there, even while wishing she could.
Do I shield him, or tell him about cruelty?
I want to teach my son about peace.
He wants to be every superhero
he's ever heard of. [62]This third section also contains the most prose-like poems. Yet their plainness suits the bluntness of the lessons both she and her son are learning from each other.
But there he is now, behind the trees
with the other boys. Bam bam!
they shout, blasting each other
with fingers and sticks, hurling
pine cone grenades. Nobody plays
the peacekeeper, limbless children, mothers
begging in the streets. [61]The closing section reflects back to childhood and parents, while encompassing the ever-expanding world of the narrator's son. Over lunch at a restaurant, their conversation explores the world, as parent and child learn who the other is. As they chat, they are doing what all of us do as we stumble our way through life, "Gathering / who we are, crumb by crumb." [79]
One of Heidi Greco's proudest accomplishments is the fact that she's a mother.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.