A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

and ashes: “She knew the language of smoke, / wrapped breath to link the confluence of
wind, rock, / and mist. / Along the crater rim in that hour between night and day.” 358
Although Juliet S. Kono shares her colleague’s predilection for quasi-biographical
explorations of family relations, her style differs markedly from Song’s. Her daring
exposition of negative feelings such as jealousy, frustration, fear, and even despair
notwithstanding, Kono’s poems convey the crucial need to distance herself from her
subject-matter. The act of writing is performed as a way of making sense, creating
meaning where thoughtlessness and confusion would otherwise reign. Her poems are
analyses, thus releasing anger, guilt, and despondency. While Song always focuses on the
capturing of a moment, a memory, Kono’s main imperative is the exploration of strong
but hurtful family relationships. One could also say that Song’s technique affects a
camera eye, a natural history viewpoint, whereas Kono’s poetry comes close to
psychoanalysis, probing the motivations behind the images.
Her second collection, Tsunami Years, is divided into three parts: “The Elizabeth
poems” explore all the facets of her relationship with an ailing and possessive mother-in-
law the poet/narrator had to care for, never omitting her own petty grievances. “Tsunami
Years” grapples with the impact that the 1946 tsunami had on her childhood and her
family, destroying their house and all their belongings, almost drowning them, still
haunting her mother’s and her own dreams. The whole family history is hinged on this
crucial event. The “Tsunami” poems are governed by feelings of attachment and
thankfulness towards her parents, whose motives and histories she reconstructs. She also
remembers her ‘growing pains,’ retracing her path away from the childhood flood into
womanhood. Also, her own and her family’s history are embedded in the community’s
and the world’s history: In the face of the various tidal waves of her childhood, tsunamis,
a world war, and internment camps, the need to retrieve the past, and to anchor herself in
it makes sense. The “Womanhood” in a poem of that title could be the speaker’s coming
of age, her menstruation, her alienation from her father, but just as well the massive
changes for the islands brought about by statehood, imaginatively likened to growing up.
358 “Caldera Illumina,” in Cathy Song, The Land of Bliss, Pittsburgh 2001: 113-20. By the time Song’s latest
collection was published, her poetry had been widely anthologized, and appeared everywhere from The
Norton Anthology of American Literature to buses and subway cars.
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