rob mclennan : Waking Occupations, by Phoebe Wang

Waking Occupations, Phoebe Wang
McClelland and Stewart, 2022

 

 

 

 

Toronto poet, writer and educator Phoebe Wang’s second full-length poetry title, after Admission Requirements (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2017), is Waking Occupations (McClelland and Stewart, 2022). Much like Toronto poet and editor Laurie D. Graham’s simultaneously-published Fast Commute (McClelland and Stewart, 2022), Waking Occupations attempts to come to terms with our colonial past and present, writing, as the back cover offers, a “meditation on what it means to live on colonial land and in colonial time, [as] the subject of these poems has moved beyond arriving and departing. It follows the figure of the artist at a time-travelling woman, embodied by mother and daughter, through the gallery of memory.” Waking Occupations is composed in four sections with an opening salvo, and I’m intrigued by the slow, narrative moments of her lyrics, comparable to frost across a window: how her poems appear to begin at a single, small point and slowly stretch out. As her opening poem, “NIGHT SCENE FOR A REVOKED CITIZEN,” begins:

In a dissolving country I petition for entry.
The sky slides to pitch and the moon goes grainy
over cloud counties     crown lands
over insubordinate shores slivered into portions
and sun-hewn roads where I’ve walked until my legs
renounced me. I’m tired with doubleness.
There, between scrub pine and dock pilings,
the water is a wiped slate      a temporary respite.

In sections “PARTINGS,” “STILL LIVES,” “BRIEF ENCOUNTERS” and “WITHOUT ELEGIES,” Wang seems, as much as anything, to pull at the thread (and threads) of the nuances and shifts of her mother, offering glimpses toward what emerges as an ongoing portrait around her shifts in country and culture. “Every stitch the same length,” Wang writes, to open the poem “without THE MEANS OF RETURN,” “my mother / maintains the uniformity of each seam. / At seventeen, her girlhood is deducted / at the end of each month.” She writes out as a way to examine and articulate her mother, and then herself, as comparison, or even counterpoint. In poems responding to specific artwork, artefacts and modes of silence, she speaks to an unease, a series of hesitations; of distance and transience, referencing journeys and her mother, and of a cultural divide, with one foot each in separate fields. “But I’ve had enough of being neither here nor there,” she writes, in “for THE SPLIT SELF,” “prone as a fish between the coming wave / and a comatose citizenry. How weary it is to be / a deportee of a dismantled aftermath. What it costs.” Further on, she offers a way into and through those same silences, writing, to open “FAMILY PORTRAIT IN ALLA PRIMA, WITH COOL TONES”: “The quality of silence, the fine, toothy grain of it, / snowlight through glass. // The dining table, varnished, indented where knots / couldn’t be smoothed out, and the cane rattan seats. // My sister and I, our feet dangling, sweatshirted, / our brows drawn like parenthesis.”

As the poems in the first section speak to that unease, and uncertainty, the poems in the second section respond more overtly to specific portraitures, still lives and sculptures, utilizing museum-pieces as a prompt for a series of meditations on culture, memory, personal history and attention. As she offers, as part of the extended poem “STILL LIVES”: “Mom’s forehead is dense as granite // as she knits to the end of the row, turns it, starts again. / She too makes good use of discards / and sticky materials, // of a lower set of standards. / She switches between vehemence and doubt, / insisting that anything worth doing is worth doing well.” Through the third section, she writes on brief encounters with a variety of household artefacts, from plastic slippers to a lacquered bowl, straw sandals and stovelight, highlighting elements of domesticity, antiquity, displaced cultures and colonialism. There’s an enormous amount going on in Wang’s lyric, threads that run through the entirety of the collection around the colonial past and continued present, on cultural divides and depictions through an array of approaches through visual art and colonial exploration. Her poems seek to acknowledge the moments and monuments constructed as ways to erase another, no longer passive but as actively witnessing, as a means to then confront the present. As she writes as part of the extended “BRIEF ENCOUNTER AT THE GREENWICH MERIDIAN”:

Not even Men of Science are exempt
from such trials. Not Cambridge-educated, senior Wranglers,
Fellows and Presidents of the Royal Astronomical Society, 

nor members of councils or holders of appointments,
nor a clockmaker and son of a Yorkshire carpenter
who for bounty or conquest 

or a townhouse in Mayfair were adamant
for a more efficacious means of keeping time
than dead reckoning, then with a fix to the last sighting 

of land as a means of reference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His latest poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), is now available for pre-order, scheduled for release on May 15. He is currently working on crafting the final draft of his suite of pandemic-era essays, essays in the face of uncertainties, composed during the first three months of original lockdown, scheduled to appear this fall with Mansfield Press.