|
Child of War. Reviewed by Barbara Jane Reyes. International Examiner. Vol 31, No. 8, Apr. 21-May 4, 2004. These pages are filled with grieving and making sense of a mother's loss of a child as the world once again finds itself in a state of war. In 2001, Genny Lirn's daughter, Danielle Mai Ting Jue, died at the age of 19. Poetry has been the medium through which Lirn attempts to understand accidents of mortality and the vibrancy of fleeting lives in a world of men who kill with utter deliberateness. Child of War is the space in which we are invited into this process. There is prayer commingled with the rhetoric of war-makers. There is prayerful repetition, as the prayer of many faiths is one piece of an oral tradition Lim invokes. She launches questions and the world launches missiles:
Here, Lim addresses her own child's death and the deaths of so many children. Her poems rely on her audience hearing these questions, and however difficult or unanswerable, attempting to provide some kind of adequate response. Indeed, the "we" referred to above is all of us. Ultimately, I believe these poems best endure in oral tradition. What is orally transmitted changes with each transmission, and to capture it upon a page is to cage what desires only its precious freedom. In "'Animal Liberation," Lim describes the setting free of a caged duck from a Chinatown poultry man. As the duck finds herself in Golden Gate Park's Stow Lake, instinct takes over, and she cavorts in lake water, into the reeds, recognizing the ducks around her as a mirror of herself:
Consider that breath is word is spirit. And that when the spirit is freed from the body, we are consoled for the loss we who remain behind experience. The body is a cage containing this relentless spirit:
|