It is tempting to read Ocean Vuong’s poetry with his life story in mind. Glimpses of it appear throughout his Forward prize-nominated debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds: Vuong was born near Saigon in 1988 and at the age of two, after a year in a refugee camp, he emigrated to Hartford, Connecticut with six members of his family. Several poems resurrect violence from before the poet’s birth, in particular the end of the Vietnam war with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Complex figures, displaced by war, haunt the book: an absent, tormented father and a beloved mother. Vuong’s intimate lyrical voice, his precise, stark imagery and engagement with gay sexuality construct a familiar story of loss, as well as the immigrant’s precarious transnational identity. But pointing to the biography alongside Vuong’s stellar rise – from the first literate person in his family to a lauded, prize-winning poet – risks detracting from the book’s literary and political elements. Balancing memory and silence with erudition, Vuong’s poetry resists being so easily pinned down.
Poetry as song, originating in lyric, preoccupies the book’s opening poem “Threshold”. The father’s singing in the shower – and a son’s surreptitious listening – form an invocation for the poet.
I watched through the keyhole, not
the man showering, but the rain
falling through him: guitar strings snapping
over his globed shoulders.
He was singing, which is why
I remember it. His voice –
it filled me to the core
like a skeleton.
The poem crosses several thresholds – a relationship between father and son, especially – and is suspended between two voices: one’s own and another animated by a shared longing. For the poet, “the cost / of entering a song” is to “lose your way back”. Vuong invokes the myth of the lyric poet Orpheus and is beguiled by a father whose guitar strings (a lyre of sorts) break over the body like water. Along the same mythical line, he writes in “Eurydice”: “It’s not / about the light – but how dark / it makes you depending / on where you stand.” Vuong’s bold use of mythology defamiliarises; he inhabits these tales in ways that are surprising and instructive. Myth becomes a way to enter the self but also the frame of language. Imagining himself as Eurydice in “Notebook Fragments”, he wryly notes, “If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here.”
Counterbalancing father and son elsewhere are two poems, “Telemachus” and “Odysseus Redux”, that draw again from myth, specifically the aftermath of the Trojan war in Homer’s Odyssey.
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through white sand, his knuckles
carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase.
The image of the drowned father, dutifully rescued by the son, is later paired with the returning father who, unlike the epic hero, fails to put his house in order. Vuong’s Odysseus is a phantom mistaken by the son for his own reflection, “my own face, the mirror, / its cracking, the crickets, every syllable / spilling through.” But these are not typical rewritings of classical myth, nor are they personal narratives overlaid onto mythical patterns, calibrated for resonance. Vuong’s language returns myth to its inception: a desire to carry the labour of human voices across time and space without losing anything.
America, too, appears as fated mythic shadow of Troy and Rome. In a poem about the 11 September attacks titled after Rothko’s 1952 painting Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown), the canvas’s portentous sky smokes blue black above a horizontal plane of colour: “They say the sky is blue / but I know it’s black seen through too much distance.” Destruction that lies decades ahead is anticipated by the cold window of the painting’s surface. Similarly, Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is undercut with incongruous scenes of American violence in the chilling poem “Aubade with Burning City”. “Of Thee I Sing” takes its title from the patriotic song “America the Beautiful”, but its dissonant lines are severed down the page in the voice of Jackie Kennedy after her husband’s assassination. The poem splits between irreconcilable loyalty to nation and disbelieving grief: “I love my country. / I pretend nothing is wrong.” For Vuong, the present occurs where past and future are locked together by rupture. It is no wonder that elsewhere in the book a mother’s voice warns her son “When they ask you / where you’re from” tell them “the body is a blade that sharpens / by cutting”.
“Immigrant Haibun” relies on a prose form of haiku originated by Matsuo Basho but employed in English by US poets such as John Ashbery and James Merrill. The haibun is imagistic and often records travels abroad, infusing it in the hands of western writers with a degree of forced exoticism. Vuong’s reversal of the haibun via the arriving immigrant turns this on its head. It also illustrates the central conceits of the book: the dark sky imbued with inscrutable meaning, the city smouldering, the ship and its family romance dashed on the rocks, and the expansive ocean between continents after which Vuong’s mother renamed him. Night Sky with Exit Wounds resists resolution, suggesting ultimately that “maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish”. Vuong’s poems, written with intelligence and tenderness, offer new spaces for becoming, where the self questions its borders, remakes itself at the threshold of language.
Eidolon by Sandeep Parmar is published by Shearsman.
• Night Sky with Exit Wounds is published by Cape Poetry. To order a copy for £8.50 (RRP £10) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
