A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

“and disappears”). One of the few of her poems not set in Hawai’i, “Symphony” aptly
showcases the artist’s preoccupations and techniques, including the (in this case musical)
order she imposes on her subject matter.
Such poems are definitely not Frameless Windows, for it is the searching mind
that unerringly creates the frame of form and (re)presentation. As the title indicates
though, the symbolic focus is on (points of) view, which is also the case in the 1994
collection School Figures. There the poet describes the revolutionary shifts in perception
that result from becoming a mother (part I, “Points of Reference”), and explores the
nature of relationships, of family, friendship, love. Again, time is halted, moments are
frozen: “It defies, for a moment, / gravity, a green apple in a blue column of air. / In a
girlhood room we meet again.” 356 Birth(ing), growing, aging, and dying are negotiated.
Death becomes even more central in her latest collection, The Land of Bliss. In it, Song
also displays an expanded range of forms and topics: poems appear like nursery rhymes,
fugues, or meditations, and a few even allow for plot-like movement. “Pokanini Girl” and
“Stink Eye” reveal her sure Pidgin voice. Epigraphs hint at influences, while
enjambements, word repetitions, alliterations, and sound clusters create hypnotic rhythms.
On a thematic level, Buddhist spirituality and the nature of being an artist permeate The
Land of Bliss as much as Song’s personal memories do. At a reading of her most recent
work, the poet disclosed the periods and events in her life that inform particular poems,
which can at least partly justify a biographical reading. 357 One can generalize that Song’s
poetry is a continuous attempt to capture and detain the passage of time. Her primary tool
is personal history, specified by genealogy, ethnicity, and sometimes place. The place is
not always Hawai’i, but the poet’s consciousness is shaped by being of Hawai’i. In
“Caldera Illumina,” for example, she expresses a poet’s need to “take the body of
language / to near death,” to go “deeper into the darkest room,” with imagery that is
clearly taken from the Kilauea area on Hawaii’s Big Island, a place of rock and rain, fire
356 “Pearls,” in Cathy Song, School Figures, Pittsburgh 1994: 59. It is striking how many temporal markers
are utilized in a single poem like “Birds of Paradise,” a poem which, ironically, describes a picture, one
moment in time: as perishable as breath on glass, overnight, a week’s worth, afternoon, all my life, in their
twenties, those evenings, through the years, toward the present, their present forms, Minutes before, into the
moment, before, this point in time, The years, ever, Already (39-41).
357 Personal attendance of Song’s reading at Punahou School, Honolulu, 02/21/2002.
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