Things That No Longer Delight Me

Poets Out Loud

by Leslie C. Chang, Cornelius Eady (Foreword)

Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes: I like objects for company, to decorate the plainest spaces, decorumandI amass details, jade bracelet, her animal-printdresses, an oval coral cameo. How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave? In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it. And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2010

Reviews

[jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

overall collection felt a bit oblique to me, but is really accurate to the feeling of being left in the dark and scrambling for fading details,, flower market really brought me somewhere dark and lonely and love blindy

I can't find you in the crowd. Women stroll, arm in arm, the busy streets strewn with petals like confetti and red firecracker paper. They carry home quince branches in the smoke-filled air. An auntie savors rock candy. The mouth of a household god is filled with money. You must be here. Where the outgoing year meets a new one in so many jostling bodies, your absence begins to feel willful. Just last year, you described the festival to me, relishing the human drama. I can't find you in the world.

[EIJANDOLUM]

And I took that stroll in her rich intricate mind.
Endless details.
Not for me though.

[abcdefg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Continuing my poetry kick, I finished up Chang's collection, and more or less, liked it.

Her poems touch on her family's history and Chinese ancestry. From relatives in photographs to simple memories she has of her grandmother and aunts, Chang connects to the elder women in her life as well as to what ties her and her family to their Chinese lineage.

Elegant and graceful, her poems are simple and zen-like in quality. What I liked most was her coverage of Chinese provincial differences in the poems "Serindia" and "In the Language of the Here and Now." Different images such as camels in the desert and sawtooth mountains in Gansu province evoke a China that is geographically diverse and immense.

To me, that's something to be taken in and appreciated.

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good deal of grace in this collection. And memorable images. It seems to double in on itself, though, in ways that didn't seem to generate new meaning for me. On an ideational level, too, I started to feel we were in familiar territory. Still, admirable.

[Ann Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very beautiful.