Burnings: A Review
D. N Kafle
Adelaide Australia
Name of the Chapbook: Burnings,
Author: Ocean Vuong, America
Publisher: The Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010
I bought Vuong’s book some six months ago and was patiently waiting for this time to go into it. The name of the chapbook as I see it at once ’ Name Name of the Chapbook: Burnings, of the Chapbook: Burnings,’ caught my attention. Hence here I end with a short review for you, stressed more at drawing the resemblance of its content to that of the Bhutanese’s painful sufferings than justifying a lengthy review through the elaboration of each poem.
The book has a long-lost history of Vietnam enwrapped and festooned in the poetical portraits of shortened lengths, with the fittings of English and some Vietnamese literary images, symbols and imageries in particular.
The whole of the chapbook of 40 pages has two sets of different sections of which the first section embeds the poet’s sweets, sours, burns and the blisters of his village and his country torn by war. The poet bleeds the horrors from a child’s point of view he saw in his village of Saigon as a very young boy. The dark side of the terrorizing nights and the images of the fallen families, friends and people around have centered the themes of most of the poems which can be seen from the lines taken from a poem entitled The Photo below.
Like all photographs
this one fails
to reveal the picture.
Like where the bullet
entered his skull,
the phantom of a rose
leapt into light, or how,
after smoke cleared,
from behind the fool
with blood on his cheek
and the dead dog by his feet,
a white man
was lighting a cigarette.
The young poet depicts the scenes of the pages of history that have barely been found to be uncovered so finely. In his lines from My Mother Remembers Her Mother, this can be understood to a quite beyond.
Each soldier leaves you steeped
in what they cannot keep: liquor, salt
of lust, the pink dust
of shattered bodies.
There are men who carry dreams
over mountains, the dead
on their backs.
But only mothers
can walk with the weight
of a second beating heart
In the poem Song of My Mothers, he flawlessly prints the bravery shown by the brave daughters of Vietnam during the war and the power upheaval leading to bloodshed. This little reader of his poetry has likened his sublime poem, Kissing in Vietnamese much where he spills his grandmother’s love-grandeur. His poem If You Are A Refugee has undoubtedly dragged me momentarily back to the small ramshackle huts in the concentrated refugee camps in Nepal where I spent about two decades as a refugee!
Other collections in this section are equally of in-depth subliminal virtue, compellingly telling the stories of his part of the broken world colouring his angst and pains in magnificent lines poetically.
The second section of this small concentrated volume consists of his miscellaneous poems in which he bleeds his very young yet matured postmodern poetic mind. Maturity, in his poems (to me) is in the sense that the poems in this section are more ecstatic, revealing the freezing love like in the poems More Than Sex and Ode To Masturbation.
Pearled semen trickles from vessel
as the silence of possibilities dries
on the floor and inside my palm.
Even now, as the body trembles
from the pleasure of its making,
somewhere, a plane
is pregnant with death.
Reach down, there is music
in the body, play yourself
like a lyre, insert the finger
into sanctum, feel
the quivering of crevices, skin
palpitating ripples as if stretched
over drumbeats.
(Ode To Masturbation)
I picked the above lines for reference from his Ode To Masturbation.
The book has tremendously brought the silenced anguishes, torments, agonies, miseries, cries, tortures and sufferings of the war-stricken Vietnamese society from the point of a young poet’s mind depicting his homeland, a small village of Saigaon. The tearing of the ten years Vietnam War, which I had only heard for years virtually played before my eyes at all the times I remained keeping my eyes around this sublime volume.
The cover page of the book is a fine art telling the meaningfully chosen name of the book, in the tone that it still freshly represents the inhuman tests and trauma to a young mind even after years of his relocation to a new dreamland. The book, as a whole more to a poetic material, could be a poet’s psychological analysis of remembering the effects of growing and strewing of mass of people due to war and violence from a child’s perspective.
A very important, yet an insignificant a suggestion may it sound to him, this little reader expects the possibility that this book be made readable to those fellow friends, relatives and countrymen back in Vietnam in their own language. A solace it may be for some to sing their freedom and inspiration for others, who knows!
Resemblance: Reading Vietnam Literarily and Beyond in Bhutan
I found it so closely telling the part of our own stories, Bhutanese stories of sufferings, inhuman treatments, and trial-less prison punishments, beatings and all from the different end of the world. The poet has left Vietnam for relocation in America but keeps painting his tears in lines of poems. His are the woes that have us more than resembled. The internal war, the stains of blood of common people anointing the soils for an earnest seeks of freedom for posterity; weren’t we torn as much as this young poet? Where are our stories? Who shall tell this watchful world of our painting stories of rape, torture, illegal treatment, murder trial-less detention, unlawful killings, deterioration of human rights and much more of the 80s and 90s that shook us and our generations?It’s now your turn to read this poet and beyond, inspiring yourself to tell the world your tales. Recommendations for counting…
About the Author: Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook BURNINGS (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010) and is a recent graduate from Brooklyn College with a B.A in English. A Kundiman fellow, other honors include a 2012 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets, an Academy of American Poets award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Verse Daily, RHINO, diode, Guernica, Drunken Boat, South Dakota Review, and The Collagist, amongst others.