"The life she will live. Later."
In the absent everyday by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa.
Apogee
Press, 2005. 81 pp. $14.95
Reviewed by Alvis Minor.
Dhompa writes often
of resolution, endings, and mortality: "Soon, your fate will be
proclaimed," the speaker announces in the poem "Review." Or,
"Letters again, but still, who can say where one finds /
resolution." And the title poem tells us, "It will all end happily,
again." Statements like these rarely refer, as one might expect, to
the failings of the physical body or even the conclusion of a
specific moment. In fact, for all the talk of resolution, one finds
very little of it in this book. As the final poem reveals, "Good
does / not have an expiration date, they say."
Because she is the first Tibetan-American poet to receive any
"substantial distribution" (as Ron Silliman tells us in his note on
the book), it would be easy to fit the poet's reflections on
mortality into a larger cultural narrative. The poems here, though,
have far greater aspirations than simply settling into the vast
clutter of identity politics. Such concerns are hardly ignored:
lamas appear frequently, usually as figures of great wisdom but
occasionally as scenery to which the speaker has grown accustomed,
and the poems often reflect on the difficulties of traversing two
very different cultures. However, the poet exerts far less energy
exposing her reader to her world than she does attempting to revise
our conceptions of meaning:
I am inclined to regret the morning's impossible tasks
supine before me like an impatient lover. Oh,
cuttlefish,
I say, but the invocation is a test to see the
effectiveness of the
word against a mundane moment. Your garden is allowed
no
flowers to bloom in red. Your mother will not grow
wise.
These lines, which
begin the poem "Increments," demand more of language than most poets
ask of it. Instead of using words to pin down meaning - or even,
like the so-called "elliptical" poets, to subvert it - the poet
opens each line here to larger and larger possibilities. What
tasks? What garden? Whose mother? The language suggests some
narrative moment, which ultimately explodes into a looser, less
defined emotional resonance. The power of each word doesn't end as
its meaning is deciphered, but grows as each new possibility is
considered.
Dhompa carefully and beautifully anchors her ever-expanding imagery
with hints of specificity, using the rhetoric of narrative to give
her readers comfort as meaning explodes around them. The poem
"Striped damsel," for example, begins with the sentence, "In the
village not far from her town, a cow gave birth / to a calf with two
heads." By the end of the poem, however, the illusion of narrative
gives way to a stark and eerie "reflection":
... Her eyelashes are losing root. Her toe bulbous and
broad. She wants to be happy but feels hurried or
conspired
against. She cannot remember the names of
invertebrates. She
would like to know her plants. The garden she will
have. The
life she will live. Later.
Again, the reader is
left with more questions than answers: What is happening to this
woman's body? Why is she thinking of invertebrates? Why must she
look to the future "later" and not now? Instead of accepting the
mystery, as one must do so often in contemporary poetry, this poet
asks us to consider limitless possibilities. No interpretation or
emotional response is privileged here, and the language crackles
with unbelievable energy as it refuses static definitions.
But this energy is often channeled through a surprisingly meditative
tone, another of the paradoxes these poems somehow manage to
encompass. Despite their occasional chattiness and explicit
rejection of tradition ("Think of / the opposite, says the wise one
[...] Now / all of a sudden, tradition is good."), the poems owe much
of their success to the fact that they maintain a staunch commitment
to lyric beauty:
The indentations of tongue made and then given
to lose in such and such a pursuit. But ah, memory
to secure at will. And poetry before the hour of
silence.
Your apercu making trees grow taller. Actor and
spectator.
Even as she challenges the limitations of language, Tsering Wangmo
Dhompa remains committed to its splendor, creating a music that
soothes as well as startles, that calms as well as compels. The
resulting poems are a triumph, champions of both beauty and depth at
a time when most contemporary poets seem to believe we are forced to
choose one or the other.