{"id":7344,"date":"2017-02-20T14:41:27","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T13:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7344"},"modified":"2017-02-20T14:50:25","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T13:50:25","slug":"ocean-vuong-night-sky-with-exit-wounds-robyn-schiff-a-woman-of-property-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7344","title":{"rendered":"Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds<\/em> and Robyn Schiff, A Woman of Property<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds<\/em> (Copper Canyon Press, $16.00)
\nRobyn Schiff, A Woman of Property<\/em> (Penguin Poets, $20.00).<\/h5>\n

 
\nOcean Vuong\u2019s extensive first book emerges one of the most difficult episodes in recent American history, the Vietnam war. Vuong, born in Vietnam, but brought up in the US, explores the legacy of that war not only in terms of its effect on his own life and the lives of his family. Vuong also, and perhaps this sounds a bit obvious, explores the legacy of the war in its effects on the imagination. For Vuong, these effects may involve relating the Vietnam war to the Trojan wars; a relation which might remind an Irish and British reader of Michael Longley. However, as I shall illustrate, Vuong\u2019s take on this is as much part of the Oedipal drama with which this collection is shot-through. Vuong also writes piercingly about the nature of being a member of an ethnic grouping in today\u2019s America; as he puts it in the poem \u2018Seventh Circle of Earth\u2019, \u2018Look how happy we are \/ to be no one \/ & still […] American\u2019. Dante\u2019s Seventh Circle is the circle of violence against self and neighbours. Vuong\u2019s Seventh circle of Earth refers to the murder of a gay couple by immolation in Dallas, Texas. Thus, Vuong, himself gay, places himself as doubly \u2018no one and still American\u2019. <\/p>\n

In poems such as \u2018Telemachus\u2019, \u2018Trojan\u2019 and \u2018Odysseus Redux\u2019, Vuong enacts the legacy of the war in terms of Homer\u2019s great epic. This enactment explores both the epic quality of the war, but also the smaller, familial dramas that Homer makes so poignant. \u2018Telemachus\u2019 begins,<\/p>\n

Like any good son, I pull my father out
\nof the water, drag him by his hair<\/p>\n

through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
\nthe waves rush in to erase. Because the city<\/p>\n

beyond the shore is no longer
\nwhere we left it.<\/p><\/div>\n

With that first sentence, Vuong creates a huge emotional wellspring for the rest of the poem. That emotion is then opened out into a vision of displacement which allows the \u2018we\u2019 to apply to all who are exiled from that place. Vuong then continues to weave the familial with the larger, <\/p>\n

I kneel beside him to see how far <\/p>\n

I might sink. Do you know who I am,
\nBa?<\/em> But the answer never comes. The answer<\/p>\n

is the bullet hole in his back, brimming
\nwith seawater. He is so still I think<\/p>\n

he could be anyone\u2019s father[.]<\/p><\/div>\n

In \u2018Aubade with Burning City\u2019, Vuong describes the evacuation of Saigon in April, 1975. The evacuation was signalled by the playing of Irving Berlin\u2019s White Christmas. And Vuong again interleaves verses from that very well-known song with piercing details from the evacuation, <\/p>\n

                                                  the chief of police
\n                    facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.
\n                                 A palm-sized photo of his father
\n       beside his left ear.<\/div>\n

 
\nAs noted above, the sense of the Oedipal struggle permeates much of this wonderful book. A Father and a Mother are described as making love in a bomb crater in \u2018A Little Closer to the Edge\u2019. In \u2018Always and Forever\u2019, the narrator is given a shoe box wrapped in duct tape. After seven years, he opens the box to find a Colt .45 \u2018silent & heavy\u2019. But Vuong also dramatizes the struggle of his mother in America. Perhaps this struggle is metonymic, as they say, of a kind of Oedipal relation between the Vietnamese and America; a struggle in which culture itself is at stage. <\/p>\n

This is an extraordinarily rich book from a young poet who is already able to make phrases dance and vibrate. He is skilled with prose poems, open form and the placement of short lines. And that technical range is allied with a hugely fertile imagination to create a book which is often unputdownable.<\/p>\n

Robyn Schiff\u2019s A Woman of Property<\/em> is her third book and that experience possibly shows in the sheer length of her individual poems which stretch out, not only down the page but also across. Like Vuong, Schiff also nods towards Greek literature with \u2018A doe replaces Iphigenia on the sacrificial altar\u2019, and, later in the book, \u2018A doe does not replace Iphigenia on the sacrificial altar\u2019; which is the same poem but a long interpolation of text in the middle of the latter. But, whereas Vuong\u2019s \u2018I\u2019 seems wedded if not identical to the authorising consciousness of the poems, Schiff\u2019s \u2018I\u2019 seems hugely dramatized. The \u2018I\u2019 of \u2018A doe replaces\u2019 is the doe itself \u2018reared\/ ruminating\/ in a thicket of\/ sorrow with a beautiful\/ strong of drool\/ hanging out the side of my\/ mouth like a loose\/ phosphorescent\/ tether.\u2019 \u2018A Hearing\u2019, for example purports to dramatise a court hearing between the narrator \u2018I\u2019, and her \u2018neighbour, a cult leader\u2019. <\/p>\n

Unlike Ocean Vuong, there isn\u2019t always a ready lyricism at hand in Schiff\u2019s poetry, although the shorter poems here sometimes do have a surface musicality. In \u2018Dyed Carnations\u2019, for example, the sentence structures are both shorter and tauter, and this combined with shorter lines results in a slightly warmer surface than is true elsewhere in the book. <\/p>\n

                                      They overnighted
\nin a chemical bath
\nand now they have a fake laugh
\nthat catches like a match
\nthat starts the kind of kitchen fire
\nthat is fanned by water. <\/div>\n

 
\nAnd it\u2019s not simply the half- and full rhyming, or the parallel line structures which create \u2018poetry\u2019 here. There\u2019s almost a kind of ironic poeticism in those mechanisms. But there\u2019s also the metaphorical play in a phrase like \u2018a kind of kitchen fire\u2019 being \u2018fanned by water\u2019. <\/p>\n

A \u2018typical\u2019 Schiff poem begins with a personal situation: \u2018God knows how our neighbours manage to breathe. \/ No one is allowed \/ to touch me\u2019 \u2018H1N1\u2019; \u2018Be careful backing up,\/ black truck.\u2019 \u2018Possession\u2019. And Shiff then stretches those ideas and motifs in long poems which are often organised around the layering of an idea, with longer sentences building parallels through sections of poems. Into \u2018A Hearing\u2019 mentioned earlier, Schiff brings in The Oresteia<\/em>, <\/p>\n

they saw the green strobe on the dock throb code
\nto the minutemen and
\nresponded as planned.          Aesop?<\/em>
\nI meant to say Atreus.
\nMotion to Strike from the Record Motion<\/strong>
\nthought they were animals          Denied<\/strong><\/em>
\nThere was a dog who recognised Agamemnon.<\/div>\n

 
\nThus, there\u2019s a feeling of an outward movement balanced against an inward movement, where the trajectory of these poems often feel both clenched and open at the same time. The final sensation is one of something which is real and yet which strives always to undermine that reality. Her themes, if that\u2019s what we are allowed to call them, often relate to ideas of violence; real violence or literary violence, such as in the princess and the pea, or somewhat more monstrously, the violence perpetrated by and meted out on the House of Atreus. Thus an atmosphere of rather more than unease permeates much of the writing in the very accomplished book. As Schiff puts it in the poem, \u2018Siren Test\u2019; \u2018if poems aren\u2019t for saying what goes without\/ saying, I don\u2019t know what they\u2019re for.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, $16.00) Robyn Schiff, A Woman of Property (Penguin Poets, $20.00).   Ocean Vuong\u2019s extensive first book emerges one of the most difficult episodes in recent American history, the Vietnam war. Vuong, born in Vietnam, but brought up in the US, explores the legacy of that […]<\/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":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nOcean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Robyn Schiff, A Woman of Property, 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=7344\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Robyn Schiff, A Woman of Property, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, $16.00) Robyn Schiff, A Woman of Property (Penguin Poets, $20.00).   Ocean Vuong\u2019s extensive first book emerges one of the most difficult episodes in recent American history, the Vietnam war. 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