Ocean Vuong's Burnings: A Review by Krystelle Bamford

It’s a strange feeling to miss a place sporadically.  I lived in New York for a few years before moving to Scotland, and when I think about the city it’s a glancing, regretful attachment.  A really beautiful and thoughtless boyfriend who you’re glad in most moments to be shot of, but once in a while you remember how he loomed above everyone at the bar with a kind of slim, bored grace that made your knees buckle.  The quality of my missing changes the longer I’m away—it becomes more distorted and fickle.  I can only imagine having this feeling intensified and then doubled—to miss a place that itself has changed dramatically and that you can never fully return to, and to see this loss reflected back in parents whose lives will always be rooted elsewhere.

The first section of Burnings, Ocean Vuong’s first chapbook, is an elegy to a partially remembered, largely imagined Vietnam, which he left with his family at the age of eight.  Vuong’s perspective shifts between a refugee’s sense of longing and displacement to a chronicler of atrocities that, at the age of twenty-one, he is almost certainly too young to have witnessed and which he reconstructs from photos and others’ memories.

One of the dangers of writing around a place you can’t quite remember or an event you’ve only witnessed through photographs is that you’re liable to become a little unmoored from the specific, incongruous details that give poetry its grit. Vuong’s poems are certainly not short on things—pearls, sheets of fire, ash, ships, photos, blossoms, skulls, songs—and are nothing if not lyrical.  Sometimes this lyricism has a raw, blunt force, as in the last two lines of ‘My Mother Remembers Her Mother’: “I tell them I was born / because someone was starving”, but the cumulative effect is overwhelming, the imagery often eclipsing itself.  Auden or Eliot or some other eminently pithy and quotable person once said that epic poets have to be masters of the dull—that no one can keep up a sustained pitch of excitement, or in this case, lyricism, without exhausting the reader. It’s possible that Burnings, with its wide historical sweep and rich, dramatic language, could have benefited from a few lulls.

Vuong has written that he admires the American poet Li-Young Lee, who emigrated to the States from China by way of Indonesia at around the same age Vuong did.  Vuong and Lee share a similar preoccupation with exile, with the loneliness of trying to see your way into a history that is less yours than your parents’.  But Lee, rather than placing himself directly in history’s path, writes about the traces of a history and culture he only half owns, and inflects his poems with a wry humor and every-dayness that allows the reader to breathe in between moments of terrible, lyrical beauty.  Burnings contains a few seedlings of humor—’Self-Fellatio as Prayer’, a tight, well-constructed poem, which begins with the lines “Exiled, I found citizenship / in the republic of my body” and ‘Echo’ whose opening lines–

someone shouted Nice bike

faggot! And I knew

my front wicker basket

provoked this

–both promise a knowing wink, a slight reprieve, but the humor is always short-lived and in service of something far weightier.

It may seem unkind to accuse a poet whose subject matter is inherently serious (rape, executions, the pain of hiding your sexuality) of lacking humor or an interest in the mundane, but Vuong does his poems’ dramatic moments a certain disservice by not allowing them to breathe a bit more.  There are many jarringly lovely lines packed into the collection—in ‘Song of My Mothers’, Vuong writes of the mother “who will not stop putting rice and fish / at the empty chair” and ‘Ode to Masturbation’ includes the fantastic “Grab your balls— / that grenade of white flowers”—but they tend to bleed together with a similar degree of intensity and drama.

Selfishly, I would have loved to see more of Vuong himself in these poems.  The latter half of the collection is ostensibly more personal, dipping into Vuong’s early grappling with his sexuality, but they still somehow lack a recognizable person at their center.  It almost seems as if, by trying for such scope, he fails to fully mine his own unique position as someone who is half participant and half observer in his own history.  Vuong’s Vietnam is chock-a-block with events and objects but in the end it lacks the interesting ambiguity, the nuanced quality that remembered, reconstructed places take on when you’re no longer there—qualities which Vuong is so well placed to explore.

Burnings is available from Sibling Rivalry Press.

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Krystelle Bamford lives in Edinburgh and works at Canongate Books.