Poetry, Wine, and Pine O Cleen

A review of Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s second poetry collection, Who Comes Calling?

Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s second collection, ‘Who comes calling?’ foregrounds domesticity as an unsuspecting space to take up poetry in ‘Rental places -/ so many splinters of stories,/ so many little pieces left behind.’ The speaker as housewife doesn’t see the practical benefits of poems ‘What good did a poem ever do me? What kind of work is this?’ but finds them anyway in the imagery of a dirty oven, its ‘Black wrinkles of grease/ furred over with grey dust’ and proof of children’s lost treasure ‘Two bright sweet wrappers/ emerge and wink, metallic, in the light’. The author is compelled to write as vocation (despite resistance), at the insistence of the poem in, ‘Who comes calling?’ when her ‘husband opened (s) the door. (and states) This could be from God.’ This collection is couched in an encompassing and compassionate faith yet is not afraid to be fallible in confronting domestic violence and child sexual abuse.

The Malaysian-Chinese and European racial identity of the author is seamlessly woven, as it tos-and-fros, between Sarawakian cuisine ‘in fat oily rings,’ ‘to let kolo mee’‘Girls (who) lie with boys’ ‘like bright, yellow hair…beneath a fringe’ immersing the reader in a rich cross-culture exchange of residence and heritage. The speaker knows what it means to be ‘different’. There is anguish and sometimes rage in their tone over ‘the stares’ and the laughable counterfeit attempts by westerners in Margaret river to stand-out ‘all chemical dreadlocks and piercings, ethno-patterned tunic flaring’. At times, there is a little too much telling how to read the poems with the ‘Introduction’ and the opening stanza in ‘A Few Thoughts on Multiple Identity’ which although personable, perhaps would have been better served as an epilogue. The poems stand on their own.

There is a particular female expression that can be read as adhering to gender roles and subscribing to feminism that overlaps. The seeming deference to identifying via the husband as ‘The pastor’s wife’ though facing the reality of child sexual abuse within Christian institutions, the representation of woman as ideally “mother” ‘I prayed for you,/ wondering what kind of God would give/ to one, so much, so little to another’, and the empathetic yet sinful connotations of a friend’s termination ‘We remember the blood poured out./ We ask/ for mercy./ We hold on to/ forgiveness.’

There is a roar of feminist defiance that insists ‘Without the woman at the kitchen sink,/ nothing is possible’ and in ‘No Epidural’ the gargantuan effort of childbirth is represented ‘Like surfing a sixteen-metre wave-/ the wall of pain rises to its roaring crest and I catch it’ ‘I ride all night’ ‘swim back to shore’ challenging the opposite sex with ‘Try that, boys.’ The very personal poem, ‘In Memory of Katrina Miles’ whose ex-husband murdered her and their family, is searching for answers as a friend with the repetitive refrain ‘I don’t understand’ only to confront ‘these bullet holes’ and Rosie Batty’s direct interpretation, ‘It was domestic violence’. There is no cushioning the reader from the brutal killing.

There is a tousle with wine and not surprising as some of the poems are set in the Wooditup/ Margaret River Wine region. The amusing and familiar to Boorloo/ Perth poets ‘Moon café is everything about poetry/ that I never was: dark interiors and retro chic.’ Yet the speaker finds their place when they ‘settle, with shock,/ on the small portrait of Jesus,/’ ‘face radiant with the joke-of-it-all:/ Remember me? I turn water into wine.’ There is a sensuality in home life and marriage that is uniquely not the first throes of the honeymoon period but the long-lasting waxing and waning of a relationship’s passion and comfort in ‘Three Love Poems’ as ‘The sound/ of one grain of sand/ falling softly/ upon another/... a slow accumulation of days/ lying cheek to cheek/’ ‘caught like glass, caught like flame.’

This collection is a work of thirty years and is particularly redolent of the very female experience of domestic life, not as bliss or boredom but a full life lived with tenacity and struggle, penned in the spare and fleeting moments of parenting. Another powerful and unflinching collection by award winning author, Miriam Wei Wei Lo.

Available from WA Poets Publishing.

https://wapoets.com/who-come-calling-by-miriam-wei-wei-lo/ (To Purchase)

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100013229250879 (Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s facebook page)