Pebble Swing
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada’s most promising emerging poets
Pebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author’s attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation—that which is unspoken, but endures.
The poems in this collection also trace the experiences of a young poet who left home at seventeen to pursue writing; the result is a series of city poetry infused with memory, the small joys of Vancouver’s everyday, environmental politics, grief and notions of home. While the poetics of response are abundant in the collection—with poems written to Natalie Lim and Ashley Hynd—the last section of the book, "Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb," forges a continued response to Phyllis Webb on Salt Spring Island, and innovates within the possibilities of the experimental ghazal form.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her bittersweet and sensuous debut, Chinese Canadian poet Wang contemplates the wonder of the natural world, the burden of cultural expectations, the role of collective memory, and identity. She uses a variety of forms, including the ghazal and anti-ghazal ("Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb") to organize digestible, understated, and deeply felt poems. Here, nature serves as a symbol for belonging. When asked where she is from, she responds to herself, "I am of this earth," then aloud with glorious snark, "My mother's womb." Wang writes of the physical world as a guide to the spiritual, aiming for the permeability and fortitude of water, "the kind that can be reached into, and still flow." She recounts the disapproval of her literary aspirations, the weight of both silence and staunch pragmatism, and the disillusionment she experienced in both China and Canada. Faced with familial secrecy, she turns to memory as an act of reverence and empathy: "my father's shame// became my obsession// what he refused to talk about/ lined my bookshelves." Wang offers a persuasive glimpse at how history can illuminate the future.
