Chuqiao Yang, The Last to the Party

 

Pompeii

The Lupanar walls speakof a woman,
her art was intercourse.
Here, once, she leftlovers to quiet deaths
on hard beds, sharp edgessoftened,
vestiges of a century ofpleasure.
A caged, beautiful birdof prey, a tourist imagines.
But you’d almost thinkthe walls spoke
of a woman whose art waspraying,
back turned to a man,knees bent,
body arched,god-searching.
A brave, dying bird ofprayer.
Colours, clay, heat,Pompeii’s countryside
burning down her body,the walls speaking
of a woman whose art waspleasure;
exhalations come a longway,
remnants of herexistence,
her worship painted onthe walls,
les petities morts in thehistory of lost lives,
little deaths in thehistory of survival.

Thereare long-awaited debuts, and then there are long-awaited debuts, such asChuqiao Yang’s The Last to the Party (Fredericton NB: Goose LaneEditions/icehouse poetry, 2024). Born in Beijing, raised in Saskatchewan andcurrently living in Ottawa, Chuqiao Yang is a poet I first discovered in thesummer 2010 issue of Grain magazine (Vol. 37.4) [see my review of such here] as part of Sylvia Legris’ stunning and maddeningly-curtailed run aseditor there. The Last to the Party follows Yang’s bpNichol ChapbookAward-winning Reunions in the Year of the Sheep (London ON: BaselinePress, 2017) [see my review of such here], a number of poems from which havebeen reworked and folded into this larger collection. In one of the finestdebuts I’ve read in some time (tied with Ottawa poet Ellen Chang-Richardson’s BloodBelies, which I’m currently reading as well), Yang writes of a prairiechildhood, various travel, family and family roots and youthful adventures,rebellions and reconciliations, her lyrics offering a richness that isconfident and subtle, considerations so clearly evident even in those poemspublished in Grain, fourteen years back. “Sometimes I float backwards,”she writes, as part of the opening poem, “The Party,” “ten times / over theSouth Saskatchewan / until I’m only kite bones / and promise: watch me, / amawkish pre-teen pedalling / uphill, licked by rime, / peering into aneighbour’s window.”

Setwith opening poem, “The Party,” followed by four numbered sections of poems, Yanghas a painter’s ability to evoke a scene, whether landscape or portrait. She writesof moments turned and returned to, or recalled, turned and turned over, tobetter see, or see differently, attempting a fresh perspective on somethingthat clearly won’t let go. Consider the short poem “Phaethon,” the first halfof which reads: “I dreamt my father was alive. // Old, but happy, just // as I hadleft him. // He was bicycling.” She writes of foreign travel and prairielandscapes; she writes of roads home, and roads that lead away, and therealization that these are but the same roads, even before and beyond the clarificationof what home means, and where, from Ottawa to Saskatchewan to Beijing, centredaround friends, partners, parents and grandparents.

There’sa thread of wistfulness, and even melancholy, that runs through these poems, asYang articulates intimate distances, drifts and attempts to connect orre-connect. She writes of a closeness that never quite feels close enough, oris never meant to last, but occasionally, unexpectedly, might or even does.Listen to the lines of the wedding-poem “Epithalamium,” a poem that ends: “Andwhile there may be // years so full of sadness // you will be reluctant to trek// the dogged trail ahead, // you will reach for each other’s // hand, feel theother’s pull, // and you will be at ease.” She writes of a lifelong search forconnection and belonging, and of finally landing at a moment that allows itselfthat comfort. Her poem “Friday,” a piece that immediately follows “Epithalamium,”includes: “Now, we share the same space, and life is a wide, / paved driveway.”