A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

You find you need China:
your one fragile identification,
a jade link
handcuffed to your wrist.
You remember your mother
who walked for centuries,
footless –
and like her,
you have left no footprints,
but only because
there is an ocean inbetween,
the unremitting space of your rebellion. 354
In the midst of giving voice to (Asian American) Woman, several poems focus on family
relations, harkening back to the previous generations, to childhood and adolescence,
evoking children dreamed of, unwanted, aborted, accepted. In these, and more routinely
in her later work, Song sets out to capture fleeting moments that might seem insignificant
to the careless reader, but are really the stuff that memories are made of. Detailing the
contents of photographs, remembering childhood experiences, imagining her forebears’
feelings, and exposing her own, the poet creates still life pictures, vignettes mainly of the
past, frozen tableaux. Her main goal seems to be to preserve and make sense of family
history. Many poems can be read in sequence, forming a biographical outline of the
poet’s genealogy and life. It is almost as if she opened her photo album for the reader,
who is allowed to gaze at what seem to be atmospheric snapshots without much
distancing on the part of the camera eye, but what at close inspection are careful
arrangements of event and interpretation. Although Song’s language is often sensuous
and flowing, the final image is nearly almost static, a moment of the past.
As exemplified in her 1988 collection Frameless Windows, Squares of Light,
Song has a keen eye for the ephemeral things that matter in the end, that trigger
rumination, meditation, interpretation: a child’s drawing, an immigrant family’s picnic
day on the beach:
On the grass beside their straw mat,
354 “Lost Sister,” in Cathy Song, Picture Bride, New Haven/London 1983: 53.
127