Fire Cider Rain, Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin
Coach House Books, 2022
Water is life. Water gives life and contains it, but water also takes life as it moves through its indifferent cycle, changes state, flows forth. In her debut collection Fire Cider Rain, published in 2022 by Toronto’s esteemed Coach House Books, poet Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin asks whether we can understand the ebb and flow of our modern lives and personal histories through the metaphor of water and its movement. With this intriguing approach Ng Cheng Hin creates a poetic ecology that encompasses diverse spheres and realms. For one, the book describes the connections between its Mauritian-Chinese narrator and her mother, grandmother, and lover. These relationships are explored not from a static, chronological perspective. Instead, the collection unfolds a plethora of mainly past moments and phases set in numerous places, including the island of Mauritius and locations in Southern Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. The transcendent, powerful yet ephemeral nature of human connection is illuminated through the prism of aquatic imagery which relentlessly pairs a troubling inconsistency with a comforting cyclical stability. This fluid scaffolding allows the poet to effortlessly blend depictions of environmental disaster, climate crisis, postcolonial critique, and the failures of global capitalism with her personal and almost geological twin-narratives. Thus, Fire Cider Rain has rightfully placed Ng Cheng Hin among the finalists of Arc Poetry’s 2023 Archibald Lampman Awards.
The book is structured into four chapters based on the stages of the water cycle from evaporation to condensation, precipitation, and collection, each introduced by carefully curated epigraphs. The initial section “Precipitate” sets the stage by showing processes that invoke dispersal, departure, separation, and disruption, such as the death of the narrator’s grandmother in “When Wàipó Died” or the all-important move from Mauritius to Canada in the long opener “Coefficients of Friction.” The latter poem invokes the disorienting effects of physical and cultural relocation, as well as the strain on the mother-daughter relationship caused by this event. The gravity of these life-defining forces becomes apparent through the surreal image of a woman refusing all change mid-transit. This woman is jumping out of the plane window in an attempt to escape “those children/those lives, those artificial hours/those old coefficients of friction.” The titular coefficient is a physics term describing the ratio of force pressing two bodies/surfaces together to the force that moves these bodies at the same time. Thus, a tension emerges between continuous connection and dynamic change. This permeates all metaphoric layers engaged by the opening poem and the collection as a whole. The falling woman contributes to this motif beyond the thought-provoking complication of consanguineal relationships as sources of “friction,” exhaustion, and change. In her self-destructive refusal, she becomes “nationless.” Hence, the scope of this dreamlike episode is drastically widened; friction is not only a phenomenon of the familial, but of the cultural, political, and historical currents that encompass all of us. Amidst a moment of unravelling and erosion, Ng Cheng Hin plants the seeds of a thematic continuity that holds Fire Cider Rain together as it develops its characters and its multifaceted themes.
The early “The Laws of Thermodynamics I” roots this continuity more firmly in the text. Ng Cheng Hin achieves this grounding through a parallelism of the poem’s opening line, directly quoting the physical law “energy and matter can be neither created nor destroyed,” and the closing line reframing this definition within the semantic field of the collection, “like mother like daughter like matter like water –.” Here, the reordering of the earth’s water through its biogeochemical cycle becomes again the movement of humans and material objects through time and space. For better or worse, nothing is ever truly lost between the narrator and her mother, grandmother, and lover. This is true even beyond the grandmother’s passing. In a poem dealing with her grandmother’s life as a lighthouse keeper, she is described as “my mother’s mother/author of disaster.” This legacy has eventually passed on to the narrator herself and applies to the book at hand, which deals not only with the difficulties of maintaining healthy family connections in the face geographical dispersal, but also with the global challenges of environmental calamity, postcolonial awakening, and capitalist oppression.
Ultimately, language emerges as the necessary nexus in which all thematic components of Fire Cider Rain can organically intersect. “Trickle Down” describes a “taxonomy of/time-lapsed skins/in sonorous build,” which emphasizes the importance of naming, of delineation, and of being heard. The passing of time as it affects our bodies is discernible beyond the testament of written language but turns into sound. “Human Dissection Lab” deepens this focus on bodily imagery and audibility with the assertion that “there will be intonation/at the centre of her unnamed body –/a physiology swollen with letters/that skew the hour. dictionaries pleated/in the sand.” These lines hint at a central piece of the collection, “Dictionaries in the Sand,” in which the skilful conflation of water, memory, relations, and the messy nature of modern urban life is most explicitly highlighted. In this list poem, Ng Cheng Hin works through a number of water-related terms, defining them one by one first scientifically, then in terms of poetic, personal, and ecological significance. Moreover, each word is accompanied by a phonetic transcription. Just like water breaks through different states of aggregation, like evolving family history breaks through time, the language of Fire Cider Rain demands to break into sound, be heard. Words become like water, and the language on the pages enacts the circulation in and out of different meanings it describes through the aquatic allegory. The collection thus cycles through the various characters and thematic concerns in a riveting poetic flow, persistently enacting breakage and return. Ultimately, the book arrives at its sorrowful final piece, the long poem, “Māmā, Where Does Your Light Leak?” Although the narrator is held by unbreakable family bonds, shown confidently through the compassionate line “although it is your mother dying, I know it is all of us at once,” she cannot but suffer from the separation and a feeling of loss at the same time. Despite the “graceful defeat learned from the renewal of water,” she begs her mother “wait for me.” The collection is propelled towards this conclusion by the friction between the cyclical movement of time and its inevitable progress towards a death that still feels final to those left alive and able to mourn in sounds and letters. Ng Cheng Hin ends by reminding us that the only powerful answer we have to the unrelenting forces that define the flow of our lives is to give lasting voice to what we experience, what we see, and feel. Fire Cider Rain is a striking testament to the potency of poetry to manifest such voice.
Martin Breul currently lives and writes in Montréal (Tiohtiá:ke). His poetry and flash fiction has appeared in print and online in Acta Victoriana, The Honest Ulsterman, From Glasgow to Saturn, Wet Grain, and others. In 2021, he was awarded the Mona Elaine Adilman Prize for his eco-poetry at McGill University, and he was nominated for BOTN 2023 by Variety Pack. His first chapbook is love poems suck, published in 2023 by Cactus Press. Twitter/X: @BreulMartin