Poetry by Cathy Song

What do I enjoy about reading poems by the Hawaiian poet Cathy Song, whose life and landscape are so different from the life and landscape I inhabit? Some of her poems explore territory that is new to me, but others depict moments I know, relationships I recognize.

In School Figures (1995), she writes movingly of relationships with women, especially. One of my favorite poems in this volume is "The Grammar of Silk," about learning to sew, in which Song describes trailing her mother through the aisles of the fabric store, where her "fingertips touched the titles--/satin, tulle, velvet,/peach, lavender, pistachio,/sherbet-colored linings" but where her mother would find a bargain remnant of brown-and-white dotted kettlecloth that Song would settle for. Song's mother wanted Song to acquire a skill she herself lacked, and her lines recall to me the way my own mother happily gave up sewing to me, once I became reasonably adept at it. When I had children, sewing would give me "what she herself was missing,/a moment when she could have come up for air--/the children asleep,/the dishes drying on the rack." Acquiring the skill, operating a treadle machine, Song says that what she learned was "the charitable oblivion/of hand and mind as one--/a refuge such music affords the maker--/the pleasure of notes in perfectly measured time." In another poem, "For Her," in the section of the book that explores grief for friends and family members, Song begins, "I am sewing a punjabi/for a friend whose mother recently died," and I think of the many ways that sewing can bind women together. Another favorite poem in this volume is "Things We Know by Heart," in which Song addresses her daughter: "You heard me singing/deep within my body, those early mornings . . ." when "I knew you then as a rumor, a hunch,/ a month skipped like a heart beat."

The Land of Bliss (2001) revolves more specifically around the Asian American experience--and yes, I know there is no unified Asian American experience, but Song's poems in this book range through her Korean and Chinese family background and Japanese/Japanese American and Buddhist references. I like the poem "City of Sleeves," which begins with a Japanese saying as epigraph, and "In the Far Wing of an Old Museum," which begins with an epigraph from Wakako Yamauchi that describes museum visitors. I love this volume, with its sections introduced by quotations from Joni Mitchell. But I don't feel that I've really wrapped my mind around it yet, having read it only a couple or three times through. Several of the last poems speak to me most clearly. The beginning of "Handful," for instance--which is nearly 1/2 the poem--focuses on the writing of poetry: "Like scooping water by the handful/out of a lake,/you write a poem,/contain it, gaze/into the small/cup of your hand." "Caldera Illumina" begins, "She came to regard the house of rain falling as her muse." The title poem of the volume, the last in the book, links this process of working and writing as drawing water with a universal concept (or rather, a terrestrial one): "Rain that falls and has been falling/is the same rain that fell/a million years ago. To think not/a single droplet has been lost/in the articulate/system of our blue planet/wrapped in its gauze of atmosphere." These three poems are poems I'd like to take into a writing class to share with aspiring poets.