It is the frequency on which these poems exist that matters, their urgency. Individual lines sometimes seem precious, pretentious or obscure but it seems footling to be detained by detail. The poetry is a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide. I am not sure why a poem about 9/11 is named after a Rothko painting but the more I read it, the more I find to admire As one reads on, it becomes evident that the collection is not so much about drowning as about the precarious work of resurfacing. It describes turning his father’s corpse over in the sea and seeing a gun wound in his back. It ends: “The face/not mine – but one I will wear/to kiss all my lovers good-night:/the way I seal my father’s lips/with my own & begin/the faithful work of drowning.” Disentangling traumatic memory from myth is no easy task. The second poem, Telemachus, is at once lyrical and horrific.
“ABC” were the only letters his beloved mother knew: “But I can see the fourth letter:/a strand of black hair – unraveled/from the alphabet/&written/on her cheek.” Even then, Vuong was, it seems, able tenderly to decipher more than he had been told to learn.Ībout his father, who dominates this collection, the story is murkier. Among the most moving poems in this debut (feted in the US and already selling in unusual quantities here) is The Gift. Vuong’s mother, who works in a nail salon, was determined her son become the first literate member of their family. He was mentored by the poet and novelist Ben Lerner and has said that without Lerner, he would never have believed it possible he could become a poet or that his talent could travel. Ocean Vuong was born on a rice farm outside Saigon, in 1988, and spent a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before moving, aged two, to Hartford, Connecticut.
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