ROXAS-CHUA 姚

Thank you, december Magazine!

February 2018 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri • Washington Independent Review of Books

Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater by Sam Roxas-Chua. Lithic Press. 85 pages.

Poet Joseph Stroud says these poems “will take you on a journey to where you have never been before.” This is true and it’s miraculous, for all of us to have the same words in English — yet a poet can, by virtue of his fantastic vision, combine them magically. Roxas-Chua is dreamlike, mythic, imagistic, bringing forth spirits from his ancestral China and the Philippines. All poetry is made of mystery but this poet transports us to a realm that is both primitive and exalted. There’s a ritual of the mind, as well as a boy inside a man, who speaks a vivid language in After His Great Fires: “…Death’s gift/is in the lifting/of limbs, of forearms, /strong like the breast/of a horse carrying/a boy on its back —/its muscles and chambers/moving the clack/of his skeleton, echoing in/the interior of a boy whose/mind like a carousel spins/against a reflection/of mad ghosts in odd/shaped mirrors.”

The father figure features predominantly in his work as a source of energy and the inequities of childhood — not forgiveness and reconciliation but something more like longing and remorse. There’s a beautiful haunting we’ve not seen exactly like this before and may not until he writes again. I wish to focus on this. The same poem (“After His Great Fires”) begins, “When my father turns his wrists/to unbutton his flannel sleeves, /I pull half the world like a mule/and sing diphthongs/ to a somnambulist God/who failed my father, /my drum, my bakunawa, /neighing — tied against/the great catalpa/where he left me his shirt, /his flannel shirt/that I inhale to believe that I am a boy:/ a bastard a bastinado, a dab/ of blood in his compass…”

And in “The Adoration & Mystery of The Fifth Thorn,” he writes: “The sound of early footsteps/presses against the wood, it is my father, //light in his substance now — little tides/under his translucent feet. An inch//is all I saw of his levitation/to the kitchen, to the back door, //to the flat chest of the yard/where I once hug on to him, //cheek on the back of his neck —/my first nosebleed//coating the white cotton of his starched collar.…”

See the poem “After the Carnival”: “I carry you, /my Strongest Man in the World, //your bloated stomach on my back —/our beard songs so beautiful//tonight — I walk home. /Father, I didn’t mind the mud//or the breaking of illuminated creatures/under my boots.… I never did close your eyes//when I sold you to the seas. Never did I take a sea palm// …/Tonight, // our fealty belongs to the sirens, /their long hair — our beds, //Their hands of soft ambulances/stitching the silver lines//back into your graying eyes.”

Roxas-Chua is also a visual artist and I believe this with all my heart.

Papel

Last night I watched my mother

milk a memory into a letter.

The fading days are here,

fiddleheads are falling

from her silver hair,

umber stems are crawling out

of her mouth as she coughs

into a pillow.

Her bed, a brittle star.

Her hands, light —

the paltry soul of paper.

Her eyes are vellum coffins

dimming in the whirl

of a lifeline.

She sleeps with folded hands —

a dorsal.

Our dancing days are over,

my hands are ledges,

my fingers drink from a bleed

in the oyster.

Thank you, New Pages for reviewing Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater

Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater is a collection of translucent, often narrative poems that float on the page and roll downstream, tumble ashore, look about, understand a bit, hop back onto the page. An old soul comes of age, in time and space these poems occur in the real place of dreams, where they yearn, and exhale.

New Pages