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If you have a farm in Vietnam

And a house in hell

Sell the farm

And go home

“Obscenities” by Michael Casey, circa 1972

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This young man, Ocean Vuong—a 23 year old English major at Brooklyn College, CUNY—was born in Saigon in 1988 and brought to America in 1990, where his schooling eventually revealed the barest details of the horror that comes to mind whenever people of my generation refer to the Vietnam era. (My generation experienced this era in living color, night after night after night, blaring and beaming from our T.V. sets: it was a depiction of the obscenity of war not scrubbed, not filtered, not censored by a Pentagon policy that now, today, allows only selectively culled embeds to report a cleansed and inadequate depiction of the essential atrocity of war.)  Indeed, interviewed by Pank Magazine, Vuong noted: “When I was in high school, I would always get excited to learn about the Vietnam War, to know my history. …And every year I would find disappointment. Where we would spend an entire month on the American Revolution, nearly an entire chapter on George Washington alone, only a few pages would cover the entire ten-year war in Vietnam, sometimes with only sparse paragraphs. …In the course of reeducating myself, I was baffled by the lies the books told. …part of my aim as poet is to do what the media and textbooks failed to: to explore the truths that we would rather forget, but cannot afford to.”

To the poetry. There is serious stuff here in these forty pages, rightly divided by, I assume, the editor into two sections with twelve poems in each. There is a prefacing, however, with a poem intended, I believe, to be Vuong’s primer of sorts on the intent of poetry itself.   

Ars Poetica – I was reminded of a line in Whitman’s, Song of Myself, here: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” Vuong places two ships upon the sea that meet, where the sole occupants of both place a plank across the hulls of the ships, and slowly step, one toward the other, their fingers outstretched, yearning to touch. As I myself, at times, find it difficult to “…get at the meaning of poems…” Vuong’s image represents, for me, the inescapable intent of poetry, both from the poet’s and the reader’s perspective…to connect, to touch.

The first twelve poems in this collection are almost exclusively a reflection of what Vuong eventually discovered with regard to the horror of the Vietnam war, and his own subsequent grieving for what that war did to the Vietnamese people, primarily his family…known and unknown. 

Let me provide some snippets. (Apologies to Vuong for the ellipses.)

BURNINGS begins this first section. It is a burning of a photograph of Vuong sitting between his mother and his aunt in a refugee camp in the Philippines.

 

Here, they are young again… Do not believe

the light in their eyes, the grins stretched

so wide, there is no room for joy.

Do not say our names. These faces

cannot belong to the ruin they became.

…No, do not say our names.

Let us burn quietly into the lives

we never were.

 

With THE PHOTO Vuong resurrects the horrid image from 1968 of a Viet Cong guerilla being executed in the street by South Vietnam’s national police chief. T.V. cameras as well as A.P. captured the execution, and the images soon became witness to the raw brutality of the war.

 

Like all photographs

this one fails

to reveal the picture.

…after smoke cleared,

from behind the fool

with blood on his cheek

and the dead dog by this feet,

 

a white man

was lighting a cigarette.

 

In SONG OF MY MOTHER Vuong dedicates the words to the Vietnamese women who perished during the war.

 

Sing of the sisters who held hands

while soldiers took turns,

who fled by closing their eyes,

only to find their bodies

too cold to return to.

 

KISSING IN VIETNAMESE

 

When my grandmother kisses…

she kisses as if to breathe you inside her, nose pressed to cheek

so that your scent pearls into drops of gold

inside her lungs…

 

THE MASTURBATION OF MEN begins with the image of Vuong’s father beating his mother, then closing the bathroom door behind him to masturbate. …when a man climaxes, it is the closest thing to surrender…

 

TIME MAKER

 

When I was seven, I believed everything

obeyed the laws of clocks. That if I held still

their needles, my father’s fist would stop

just before my mother’s perfect nose

and the song on the radio would play forever

the word—love

 

ARRIVAL BY FIRE is preceded by a quote from Ilya Kaminsky: “What you call immigration, I call suicide.”

 

…When we reached the new world, we dissipated

into shadows, apologized for our clumsy tongues

our far and archaic gods. We changed our names

to John, Christian, or Tina. How many mirrors

have we tried to prove wrong?

 

The second group of poems reveals Vuong’s queer self, as well as some other beautiful images quite removed from the starkly dark first section.

 

In REVELATION Vuong gives us an image of boys in a tentative discovery of the beauty of themselves.

 

In the path of trembling hands…I dreamed

the extraoridnary things

light would do to the parts I touched:

tuft of hair, silk of foreskin, the wet pearl

emerging from its sheath.

 

MOONLESS is, I believe, a poem of self-redemption, a celebration of acceptance of oneself.

 

In a room illuminated

by a streak of semen…

The ceiling has dissolved,

the stars forgot their duties

as contellations and fell

dusting our shoulders

with the swirl of galaxies.

 

…Tonight, we become at last

the tasters of light.

 

SELF-FELLATION AS PRAYER  I will leave for you to discover on your own. My note to myself for this one: INTERESTING!

 

ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME is a lovely, yearning poem about caring for a sick friend or lover, and wanting so desperately to merge with the one dying and go back to beginnings, to go back

 

to the heartbeat’s ascension, to the sound

of water overflowing, two boys,

laughing in the distance—the night

and all her unlit stars

pouring from their mouths.

 

GARDENING WITH THE SON I WILL NEVER HAVE is one of my favorites. Vuong begins the poem by asking the question:

 

How do I explain

to the small boy beside me,

the difference between his skin

and the velvet shells of tulips?

 

The beauty of the ensuing words, images are sentiently engaging, masterfully constructed. As they plant the pods, there is the observation that

 

…each pod contains instructions

to swoon to the tune of zephyrs

and stretch the petals

that stroke our breaths.

 

SONG ON THE SUBWAY recounts, yes, a ride on the subway. A blind man enters the coach, and begins to play a violin.

 

…I want nothing

but to put my fingers inside his mouth,

let that prayer hum through my veins.

I want to crawl into the hole in his violin.

I want to sleep there

until my flesh

becomes music. 

ODE TO MASTURBATION

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.

Yes, the snippets provide some small example of this young man’s extraordinary talent. The collection must be read in toto to glean the full extent of what Vuong has gifted to us. I thank him for those gifts. And if I tell him that as I read his work, the visages—all smiling, shaking their heads in wonderment—of Lorca, Borges, Spender, Ginsberg, Whitman, passed through my consciousness not as masters of the art to which Vuong surely aspires, but as equals most pleased to welcome Vuong into their exclusive coterie.   

Reviewed by George Seaton