Nick Thran Reviews:

Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin, Fire Cider Rain, Coach House Books, 2022

rob mclennan, the book of smaller, University of Calgary Press, 2022

Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s debut Fire Cider Rain begins inside a plane leaving Mauritius, flying over Africa to France, then over the Atlantic Ocean to Canada. The book’s throughline linkage of diaspora, displacement and liquid dispersion is quickly established: ‘along a fibrous ridge of rain/the bodies converged.’ Many of those bodies belong to women. Mothers. Daughters. One is the speaker, eight years old. They are ‘dew-borne’ and ‘dew-torn’ women. ‘Coefficients of Friction’ begins in a state of suspension, like a cloud about to rain, like a glass of liquid newly tipped. This is an opening typical of others in the collection: poems that begin as ‘snow/drips from suburban eaves,’ or with someone’s head described as ‘smoother than the wine spilled at her funeral.’ Some of the poems start at a suture, or ‘south of sutured harbours.’ Or they’ll begin with a wound already opened, one that ‘pulsates under/noonday sun.’ What follows is an overflow of feeling in the Romantic sense. Line lengths break quickly when the action calls for bobs or breaks; lines extrapolate when memory, passion or pathos encourage more spillway. The effects feel similar to having one’s eyes immersed in a J. M. W. Turner seascape, in ‘a wet- earth memory of itself.’ Much of the tension in the poems arises as Ng Cheng Hin’s images and tone modulate between glistening and drowning, desiring and destroying, cleanliness and mould, presence and memory, paths and floods. These poems firmly identify as ‘ecotones,’ as regions of transition.

Ng Cheng Hin, who has studied environmental toxicology, incorporates the diction and procedures of thermodynamics and chemistry into her poetics as, among other things, a means of establishing rhythm and of swerving away from some of the clichés of water-based metaphors. The book sometimes reminded me of the way Liz Howard (who blurbs the collection) draws from a working knowledge of neuroscience in Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent and grafts that knowledge upon the anecdotal, the personal and our country’s shameful colonial history. Ng Cheng Hin’s specialized knowledge works effectively at those moments when it converges with an additional level of culturally specific observation, as in ‘Lessons in Southern Tides’:

in a biotic bedtime story
does it come back alive,

virga simmering in the middle
of our lives?

they say the rain is wider
where the women are wearier

I love this idea of a bedtime story being a part of one’s very biology, and how the image of the simmering rain follows as a kind of storybook illustration that opens onto a statement presumably drawn from cultural knowledge (this opening section is set in the Mauritian village of Pereybere). This poem and others highlight a tri-generational line between the poet, her Māmā and her Wàipó (maternal grandmother), who, along with a recurring figure named Selia to whom queer love poems are addressed, are the main sources of personhood in the collection. Withdrawal and absence are heavy themes in the relationships between the three family members, and the ripples of grief following Wàipó’s death widen the distance between mother and daughter. The speaker of these poems often longs for what has been lost in migration or travel and mourns the way these distances have erased the specific points of reference so often essential to intimacy: ‘I experienced entire lives: as absence,’ she says in a poem that dreams her back onto the small island of her ancestors. Elsewhere in the collection, the speaker’s Māmā states, ‘If you want to make a goddamned life for yourself, let that be in the space between rainstorms.’ That the collection contains so few of these spaces between rainstorms seems to be an intentional gesture. By the time the book closes with the (possibly) icy lines ‘this/is a loveless/ dance,’ I found myself plunging back into the collection, naively trying to locate more clues as to what that phrase ‘a loveless/dance’ might mean as a summary of the book’s poetics. I’m still swimming around, a little uncertain, but I believe this feeling of being surrounded by water, trying to locate and identify oneself in relation to others in an environment of constant change and flux, is central to Fire Cider Rain.

Conversely, rob mclennan’s the book of smaller has a pretty solid architecture, albeit one built of stacked chapbooks and dust. ‘I’ve reached the point at which I prosper,’ the veteran poet and small press impresario writes at the end of the poem ‘Origin Story.’ The quoted sentence is the longest in this single-paragraph prose poem (typical of most of the collection’s 108 poems), a kind of relief valve of complete statement after a staccato series of sentence fragments. The rest of the poem consists of these flecked and fragmented sentences, often one to three words long. The anecdotal details are often chipped away because the poem is in a hurry to move, and like the sidewalk in another poem, it has ‘no taste for anecdote.’

This is the strongest work of mclennan’s I have encountered. Beyond the text, it is enough here to know mclennan is busy, not just as the prolific writer, voracious reader, active reviewer and community builder we’ve always known him to be, but now also as the socially conscious stay- at-home father of two young girls, trying to forge a midlife path of humility, service and domestic care. the book of smaller traces the mind in a period of domestic busyness and identity renegotiation, themes that resonate beyond the brevity of his sketches. It’s prosperous (and sometimes joyous) to have so much to get to, and not enough time to get to it, to make do with ‘such wonderful scraps.’

That mclennan does not refuse the joys and comforts of his situation is palatable only so far as he does not revel in them at the expense of an awareness of other realities. The excitement over the domestic only seems fresh insofar as mclennan acknowledges and accounts for the debt of the women who have cared for him (‘Sentence my mother used’ is composed entirely of his mother’s commonplace queries). He acknowledges those who have written so much of the literature of the domestic before and alongside him, using spareness and fragmentation as both an aesthetic choice and a survival mechanism, employing poetry as the most concise means of getting the most down in the smallest space possible. And he acknowledges the mothers and caretakers of certain avant-garde, lyric and modernist traditions: Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, C. D. Wright and others. A poem like ‘Lorine Niedecker’ is a good example of how mclennan is able to balance a lot of these potentially conflicting elements:

This poem, blood, the minerals. Road signs, waver. A measure
of woodland. Beneath expression. Furthermore. The singularity
of rock, of river. Water levels high, and higher. What kind of
birds. Parliament Hill, Chaudiere, old E.B. Eddy. Condos, this
domesticated trail. Scored path and step. Algonquin footfalls,
long before Champlain. The corruption of shoreline. Richmond
Landing. Poem, set in stone a concrete pillar shored up set into
the bones of highway. In every part of every syllable. Carved
cracked and worn and patchwork smooth.

I like the debt the title pays to the modernist poet in the title, one who was largely ignored in her time. Then I like the simple delineation of three things in the opening line, stating matter of factly that the poem is among other things and is not the thing itself. I like the way it takes a kind of inventory, ‘beneath expression,’ that hints at a wider web including climate change, colonial history, corrupt politics and gentrification. And I like how mclennan is generous enough not to impose much of himself beyond this arrangement of fragments. There are no grandiose opinions or longwindedness. the book of smaller works because mclennan seems conscious of history without trying to impose his will upon it; and he seems aware of the caricature he would risk becoming if he spent too much time in his poems watching his children splash in puddles or waving his fists at squirrels (though there’s a bit of that in here too).

Like Ng Cheng Hin’s, mclennan’s poems represent intervals or transitions. But there is more space between storms in mclennan’s book. When snow arrives in the book of smaller, it is not the oppressive reminder of a warmer home elsewhere that it is in Fire Cider Rain but a snow ‘for [his] daughters.’ The planes mclennan writes about are not carrying him to an unknown country but rather bringing his wife back from out-of-town work to reunite with the family. Meeting these two books at the same airport is a reminder that so much of craft can be influenced by circumstance, that even the ways we make sentences can hinge on whether we’re being forced to leave or are waiting for someone we love to come home.

—Nick Thran