Letting in the Light: Review of Isabella Wang's Pebble Swing
Isabella Wang, Pebble Swing.
Nightwood Editions, 2021. $18.95 CAD.
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How can you love a language you don’t remember, a city as full of ugliness as beauty, and a natural world that is in peril? How can you choose to honour parents who reject your dreams and seem to reject you in the process? In her debut collection, Pebble Swing, Isabella Wang accomplishes all this and much more by way of openness, observation and a unique delicacy.
Her delicate touch is especially evident in a number of poems that utilize and adapt the ghazal form, which requires the couplets within it to be connected only loosely and imagistically. The collection includes both true ghazals (at least as “true” as approximations of a form not originally written in English can be), i.e. with repeated end-words and direct references to a speaker in the final couplet. And there are “anti-ghazals”, a phrase coined by Phyllis Webb, including a series where the speaker strives “[t]o write as Webb” (63), emulating the older poet’s writing process: “I open a new deck of index cards. // Blue, pink, yellow / Phyllis, did you write them on the front side // or the back?” (63). As John H. Hulcoop has said about Webb’s ghazals (in his introduction to Peacock Blue, her collected poems), Wang’s ghazals also demonstrate a “lightness of tone that belies the richness of texture”.
Some of the work is situated within a broader poetry of place―especially the city of Vancouver and its environs―and eco-poetry, notably the prose poem “Spawning Grounds” that speaks of an ersatz “rewilding” that brings “[n]ature into industrialization” so “fish that rely on muscle memory year after year” are unable to return to their spawning grounds (88). Lyricism abounds in images such as “the negative spaces of longing and marrow // where fingers and bones are still rummaging / for explanations” (19).
A particular strength in Pebble Swing is how it explores both remembrance and forgetting―or fearing forgetting / wanting to forget―with “some histories / too loud for young ears to hear” (24). A long poem “I Remember” (which employs the anaphoric technique Joe Brainard exemplified) begins with the speaker’s memories, but expands from there to events long before her birth, the memories of parent and grandparent, probing intergenerational trauma, reliving stories of deprivations and political repression during the Cultural Revolution, and the legacies parents endure that leave them unable to appreciate a daughter’s chosen path.
Wang evokes early days in the speaker’s life when her mother “trains my body, furls me / in a blanket rolled so tight / there will be no room for mistakes.” (41). In another poem, this mother views “the impracticalities of writing” as a distinct mistake: “throw[ing] your future away” (56), and cautions that writing about family will have repercussions. The father appears to be more passive and less critical, but his frequent absences and his unspoken shame leave an unfulfilled longing: “what he refused to talk about / lined my bookshelves” (48). Grandparents are largely rendered with tenderness and sympathy in scenes during the speaker’s life or in recreated memories. Yet there is the poignancy of “I remember forgetting the fact / that the members of my family have forgotten me” (29).
In Pebble Swing, remembering and forgetting are also intricately connected with language, as suggested by the title “On Forgetting a Language” (also the title of Wang’s 2019 chapbook, from Baseline Press, most of the poems from which are contained in the first two sections of Pebble Swing). In the poem, the language of the body is paralleled with spoken language, although “[q]uitting ballet isn’t like forgetting / my first language” (31). The book is studded with many stunning observations on language: “I tried to annihilate / my own language from inside of me” (53); “Therefore I remember land / as a body of poems … I carved into the ground with a stick / and turned into mud with the tears of my father” (27).
Wang writes of “days when the task of translation becomes too great” (29). The task can indeed be too great, and Wang experienced some nasty blowback on Twitter for mentioning that she deliberately chose not to translate or footnote the Chinese characters and pinyin that appear in a few poems in her book. She was met with complaints about “lack of accessibility” from trolls and the perplexed, despite the fact that Chinese languages have been written and spoken in British Columbia since at least 1858. In Pebble Swing, context most often helps clarify words or characters that, to some readers, are unfamiliar. But even where those of us with limited language skills can’t parse the meaning, these touches of multilingualism add a richness and depth, countering the statement that the speaker “realized there was no place / for my language in this new country.” (31).
“I remember it takes more than one person to remember” (24) Wang writes. Many poems, addressed to friends and mentors, both those known in person and through their work, speak to the vital importance of community and chosen family: “The poetry of Li Bai / clearer than any in language that has been / bestowed upon me” (24); “After Ghalib, / I write in homage to all the women poets I know” (71). The sequence for Webb and the title poem that addresses Natalie Lim are the most conversational in tone, but there are also poems for writers such as Ashley Hynd, Rita Wong, and John Thompson. Through close friendships and new love, the speaker realizes that “poetry isn’t just in the song of the grieving” (71). In the book’s ecstatic final poem, a love song, Wang reminds us that “one doesn’t have to be made of glass to let light in…” (104).
In addition to being a poet, Isabella Wang writes essays, scholarly work and (rumour and Twitter tell me) a novel in progress. Pebble Swing is an evocative, multifaceted and far-reaching debut from a wonderful talent whose work bears the promise of even richer delights to come.
Frances Boyle is, most recently, the author of the poetry collection, Openwork and Limestone, forthcoming from Frontenac House in fall 2022. Her other books include Tower, a novella and Seeking Shade, a short story collection that won the Miramichi Reader Very Best! Award and was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award and a ReLit Award, as well as two earlier books of poetry, Light-carved Passages, and This White Nest. Other awards for her writing include the Diana Brebner Prize, This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt and Pulp Literature’s Magpie poetry prize. Originally from Saskatchewan, Frances has long lived in Ottawa where she is a past board member of Arc Poetry Magazine, and a current reviewer for both Arc and Canthius.