{"id":12153,"date":"2021-11-17T11:26:27","date_gmt":"2021-11-17T10:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12153"},"modified":"2021-11-17T11:27:22","modified_gmt":"2021-11-17T10:27:22","slug":"kimiko-hahn-foreign-bodies-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12153","title":{"rendered":"Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kimiko Hahn |\u00a0Foreign Bodies |<\/em> W.W.Norton: $26.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a strong, driving sense of personal narrative in the poems in Kimiko Hahn\u2019s tenth collection, Foreign Bodies. <\/em>\u00a0It feels clear that the \u2018I\u2019 in the poems is the writer, herself.\u00a0 This is a first person who is almost fiercely committed to the narratives that create the trajectories of the poems in this book.\u00a0 The poems are often quite substantial sequences running over a number of pages.\u00a0 And there is another sequence \u2018charms\u2019 <\/em>which also runs through the book.\u00a0 Thus the reader is often taken through a number of stages in Hahn\u2019s poems.<\/p>\n

Those stages may be occasioned by and likened to the \u2018foreign bodies\u2019, the objects, that the cover blurb points out.\u00a0 Thus, the stages of the narrative vehemence are sometimes pegged to objects. The first poem\/sequence in the book, is called \u2018Object Lessons-From Chevalier Quixote Jackson\u2019. It meditates on the \u2018foreign bodies\u2019 which where taken from actual bodies by the Dr Chevalier Jackson.\u00a0 The cover shows a section from a panel of these foreign bodies, that resides in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.\u00a0 These objects are as bizarre as you might imagine, \u2018miniature binoculars, silver horse-charm, four open safety pins\u2019.\u00a0 Hahn\u2019s poem then meditates on the objects that she had accumulated herself.\u00a0 In a visit to a safety deposit box, she notes, \u2018old wedding bands, diamond earrings twice worn, and Mother\u2019s jewelry-inherited and rarely worn. No-never worn. Safe keep. Kept here. From myself.<\/p>\n

Then there are bonds for the children. (I haven\u2019t ever checked the other one containing the deed with the new husband.)<\/p>\n

This extract will give you some idea of the tone and cadence of Hahn\u2019s poems.\u00a0 The poems are often clear and unvarnished, often conversational.\u00a0 The reader is not so much let in into Hahn\u2019s musings as taken by the hand through them.\u00a0 At the end of that first paragraph, the staccato, broken syntax is as much conversational and emphatic as it is a tautening of the \u2018poetic\u2019 line.\u00a0 The reader is left in no mind as to the attitudes here, and also the relationships of which the words are clearly the tip of an iceberg.\u00a0 And in the next paragraph (this is an extract from a \u2018prose\u2019 section in the poem), there is a neat irony with the word \u2018bonds\u2019.\u00a0 And that only superficially throw-away sentence in parentheses.\u00a0 There\u2019s a kind of conversational exoticism too, in the play with grammar, \u2018Safe keep\u2019 and \u2018the new husband.\u2019 Here too, Hahn\u2019s skill is to point the reader to much larger matters, in the way that a good novelist would, without actually stating things.<\/p>\n

There is much more \u2018exoticism\u2019 to this poem, too.\u00a0 Particularly, in Hahn\u2019s almost delight in the weird collection of substances and objects that humans put inside their various orifices; the mouth being only one!<\/p>\n

Towards the end of this collection, Hahn appends an essay on \u2018Japanese poetics.\u2019 Hahn comments that \u2018in a haiku, one word can explode the seventeen-syllable economy.\u2019 Hahn is fond of using the word \u2018explode\u2019 about the potential of words.\u00a0 Towards the beginning of the essay, she suggests that \u2018Words can be as unstable as nitroglycerin.\u2019 And Hahn is much taken by ambiguity;\u00a0 part of her essay discusses \u2018pivot-words\u2019 where \u2018a series of sounds is used to mean two things at one by different parsings.\u2019 She goes on to show that a single word in a poem by Ono no Komachi means both \u2018moon\u2019 and \u2018chance\u2019.\u00a0 She then goes on to show how four different translators have been unable to reproduce the \u2018potential explosion\u2019 enabled by the \u2018pivot word\u2019;\u00a0 an effect which is irreproducible in English.\u00a0 In effect, the force of the poem as a whole is lost in translation.<\/p>\n

Famously, of course, Frost said that poetry is what gets lost in translation.\u00a0 Hahn\u2019s essay emphasises this point.\u00a0 However, her point might have been better concentrating the nature of \u2018pun\u2019 with which she begins the essay.\u00a0 As she comments,\u00a0 her own poetry is often an attempt to breath new life into puns.\u00a0 And ambiguity both can be and has been built into poetry in English since time immemorial, as Empson also famously dissected.\u00a0 Hahn, herself, acknowledges this in the punning on \u2018object lesson\u2019, \u2018foreign object\u2019, \u2018constant objection\u2019, \u2018direct object\u2019, and \u2018object theory.\u2019\u00a0 A colleague of mine once appended \u2018round objects\u2019 in the margin of a report, to which his line manager replied with \u2018Who is Round and why does he object?\u2019\u00a0 Sometimes puns can be lost, but a poem is usually a place to look for them.<\/p>\n

And that wrought density of writing isn\u2019t what the reader might look for in Hahn\u2019s poems.\u00a0 What emerges from these poems is a powerful empathy for humans but also for animals.\u00a0 In \u2018Hatchlings\u2019, Hahn writes about the \u2018cooing\u2019 that researchers have found crocodile hatchlings that emit just before birth.\u00a0 After speculating why the hatchlings might be cooing, she ends the poem with,<\/p>\n

Maybe, though, cooing is fun. How
\nto research what transpires
\nin the head of a hatchling
\nbefore it\u2019s hatched \u2013
\nand why we need to know \u2013
\nmight well be an intimacy
\nnot meant to be trespassed.<\/p>\n

\u2018Hatchlings\u2019 is slightly unusual in the book because it is a single page length poem.\u00a0 And it shows how Hahn can skilfully create a short narrative of speculation.\u00a0 This is a narrative which creates a neat negative of what she achieves in her longer poems.\u00a0 This poem refutes the notion that we can or should fully enter the lives of others;\u00a0 that our speculations might be both fruitless and unrequired.\u00a0 What the poem shows is that Hahn is very conscious of the fact that the way she writes is an examination of lives which, in itself is fraught with danger, offering both pretended intimacy and trespass.<\/p>\n

And yet these examinations are part of Hahn\u2019s undoubted power.\u00a0 The sequence \u2018Ashes\u2019 follows on from \u2018Hatchlings\u2019, and examines her own responses to the possibility that her father has lost or at best mislaid her mother\u2019s ashes. In a series of five-line, tanka-ish poem sections, Hahn explores those reactions.\u00a0 One of these sections runs,<\/p>\n

In my kitchen, logs blink in the fire \u2013
\nthrough blinds, the wind blusters and
\nbrowbeaten trees creak in the orchard.
\nThe rain pours then stops for sun. If
\nhe lost Mother\u2019s ashes what more could I stand?<\/p>\n

The concentration on description, which emerges into a powerful emotion is, perhaps, one kind of formulation those of us unpractised in Japanese poetry might expect.\u00a0 The words \u2018blink\u2019, \u2018blusters\u2019 and \u2018browbeaten\u2019 lead us into the final line.\u00a0 Their atmosphere is simultaneously querulous and directive.\u00a0 Via the penultimate line with its clear monosyllables and strong rhythm, we move into the last line.\u00a0 Again, this is a line stripped of both adjectives and emotive verbs.\u00a0 The verbs in the line \u2018lost\u2019 and \u2018stand\u2019 are positioned at either end of the line to hold it in the tension created by the \u2018If\u2019 at the end of the previous line.\u00a0 Its power again lies in its simplicity and clarity. This is a power which has no need of explication or defending.<\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kimiko Hahn |\u00a0Foreign Bodies | W.W.Norton: $26.95. There is a strong, driving sense of personal narrative in the poems in Kimiko Hahn\u2019s tenth collection, Foreign Bodies. \u00a0It feels clear that the \u2018I\u2019 in the poems is the writer, herself.\u00a0 This is a first person who is almost fiercely committed to the narratives that create the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nKimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12153\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Kimiko Hahn |\u00a0Foreign Bodies | W.W.Norton: $26.95. 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